EMC Corporation announced the results of two Big Data contests it hosted to analyze motorcycle racer, John McGuinness aka The Morecambe Missile, to see why he is so fast. One contest focused on data analytics while the other focused on data visualization. There were over 750 competitors with $7,500 worth of prizes at stake.
EMC Corporation announced the results of two Big Data contests it hosted to analyze motorcycle racer, John McGuinness aka The Morecambe Missile, to see why he is so fast. One contest focused on data analytics while the other focused on data visualization. There were over 750 competitors with $7,500 worth of prizes at stake.
Big Data presents problems on how to manage and analyze it while holding the promise of great insights that could help in several fields, from helping businesses to make better decisions for greater operational efficiency, and reduce costs and risks, to helping scientific and medical communities greater accelerate research. However the data can be so large there are limited methods to search, store, or analyze it. Another problem that arises is pointing out the benefits of Big Data to most organizations, as it is such a complex idea. With the motorcycle math competition, EMC has taken Big Data and applied it to a read world situation to illustrate how this data can be used. Not only that, EMC opened the competition up to hundreds of people to see how they would analyze the data.
The subject EMC chose to analyze was John McGuinness. McGuinness is considered to be one of the best motorcycle racers in the world with a high versatility, racing all types and classes of motorcycles. While McGuinness has been racing for 25 years, he is most known for his wins at Isle of Man TT races. At Isle of Man TT, McGuinness has won 22 times. He was also the first person to break the 130mph barrier at the race. When asked why he is so good, he truthfully answers, “I don’t know.”
The experiment took place at the Circuit Monteblanco in Spain. EMC fitted McGuinness and the control subject, motorcycle racer journalist Adam “Chad” Child, with sensors on their racing suits and bikes. EMC was able to capture over 700,000 rows of performance, biometric and mechanical data. Several variables were collected from both the machines and the drivers throughout the course of the race to be further analyzed.
Of the 750 participants in the competition only 28 finished with two taking the grand prizes. The winner of the data analytics competition, Stefan Jol, found that McGuinness braked harder going into a turn, giving him a better line, and thus more speed throughout. Stefan Jol broke the track into different elements and looked at how each element affected the other. The winner of the visualization portion of the competition, Charlotte Wickham, made the relative performance of each rider more apparent to the non-data scientist.
EMC was so impressed with the results that they have redone a more in-depth test at the Isle of Man TT this year and are analyzing the data now.
EMC’s Math Behind The Morecambe Missile
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