Edd Dumbill, the technologist, writer and programmer, is the program chair for the O’Reilly Strata and Open Source Convention Conferences. He dropped in on theCube at Strata-Hadoop World 2012 to talk Big Data and the future of some of the big data projects he is working on, with hosts SiliconAngle founder John Furrier and Wikibon co-founder Dave Vellante.

Big data is now exceeding the processing capacity of conventional database systems. Within this data lie valuable patterns and information, which can then be extracted to enable new products and services.

Dumbill explained a mini conference project with multi-interface data sensors that are placed throughout the Strata event. These sensors have been recoding and streaming data up through a wireless mesh networking system, collecting slew of information like humidity, noise, and temperature.

Big Data analysis requires processing huge volumes of data sets at an extremely fast pace. This need sparked a sudden emergence of technologies like Hadoop, and implementation of the MapReduce approach pioneered by Google to pre-process unstructured data on the fly and perform quick, exploratory analytics.

Along with new pre-processing technologies, Dumbill said the growth of alternate DBMS technologies like NoSQL and NewSQL is helping in analyzing large chunks of data in non-traditional structures.

John shared the point that the arrival of the Internet of Things and the web have added a new dimension, bringing in an era of entirely digital business. Companies are currently lagging in developing comparative strategies to deal with such data. Dumbill agrees, and shared that new startups are beginning to develop products and services to deal with Internet of Things and data of people and companies, and not only machine data.

In a response to the future projects, Dumbill discussed some of his current projects, which he plans to showcase at a Cloudera 2015 event. The first one is to develop big data solutions based on IT organizations’ prospective, and second; exploring the vision of UI virtualization (he called it Design Track), which will connect every user interface. The next project he is working on is “Connected World”, which will bring together Internet of Things, mobile, and sensory input.

He sees the future of big data as “not just the world reaching a data center, our data center is reaching back to the world, communicating with us.”

The emergence of these new technologies is further fueled to educational sector. Dumbill is currently working on a project in building educational contents in association with a new journal called Big Data, where he is the editor-in-chief. He says by creating a knowledge base around big data in the form of forums, theories, real time examples, educational contents, and contribution from industry leaders etc. can transform the learning of big data to better cope with the future we’re inventing.