Originally posted by Ricardo Jimenez on LinkedIn
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/my-visit-mit-ricardo-jimenez-peris/
Taking advantage of my visit to Boston due to our stand at Enterprise Data World, I visited a couple of groups in MIT from the Media Lab.
The visit was really interesting. I was first with Esteban Moro, who is doing a very interesting work about extracting geo-temporal insights for users of an app at very large scale. It turns out to be a very interesting use case for LeanXcale database and make use of its dual interface, key-value and SQL. The problem to be solved implies to ingest data at very high rates and very large volumes what makes the key-value interface quite suitable, while at the same time making many queries, based on keys, ranges and distance.
Later, I met with Luis Alonso, who is doing an amazing work with the next evolution of smart cities. Till now most of what I have seen around smart cities, it is just small data and not providing any appealing insight. However, they are taking a holistic approach in which they have managed to involve different data providers at different cities to really discover interesting insights that can help to improve the efficiency of cities. In the photo with him, you can see one of the models of the smart cities they have. They use Lego blocks to build a 3d model of the city, and then with an overhead projector they project the behaviour of people segmented according different parameters, such as nationality, gender, age, and one can see during different events how the behaviour is different across population segments. Really interesting work and turns out to be also a very interesting use case for LeanXcale since they require correlating massive amounts of data in real-time.