“The Great Data Integration Schlep ” by sarahconstantin

Midjourney, “Fourth Industrial Revolution Digital Transformation”This is a little rant I like to give, because it's something I learned on the job that I’ve never seen written up explicitly.

There are a bunch of buzzwords floating around regarding computer technology in an industrial or manufacturing context: “digital transformation”, “the Fourth Industrial Revolution”, “Industrial Internet of Things”.

What do those things really mean?

Do they mean anything at all?

The answer is yes, and what they mean is the process of putting all of a company's data on computers so it can be analyzed.

This is the prerequisite to any kind of “AI” or even basic statistical analysis of that data; before you can start applying your fancy algorithms, you need to get that data in one place, in a tabular format.

Wait, They Haven’t Done That Yet?

Each of these machines in a semiconductor fab probably stores its data locally. [...] ---

Outline:

(00:56) Wait, They Haven’t Done That Yet?

(03:28) Why Data Integration Is Hard

(03:56) Data Access Negotiation, AKA Please Let Me Do The Work You Paid Me For

(10:20) Data Cleaning, AKA I Can’t Use This Junk

(14:00) AI is Gated On Data Integration

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First published:
September 13th, 2024

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/7L8ZwMJkhLXjSa7tD/the-great-data-integration-schlep

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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