Oscillations in Dynamic Big Data in the Internet of Souls

I am helping an old mate out at the moment. He is the head of IT and Engineering at one of our better tech universities.

They are moving their student engagement software into the cloud. All of it. Third party apps, interaction stuff, social networks, everything.

I suggested that they monitor everything they can about student habits of engagement with these cloud services; where they are, what they are doing, when in the day, which buttons are being pushed etc.

And if this data was correlated with student performance, the habits of the best students could be fed to all the students so they could as least replicate these in an attempt to improve themselves.

Me-thinks this is an interesting area of commercial opportunity.

Firstly, it’s not IOT because it’s humans that are being automatically monitored in a closed set. Let’s call it the Internet of Souls.

Secondly, it may look like a Big Data project with learning algorithms that are used to find the correlating patterns of interest, but it will be in real time, not after the fact. So I would call this Dynamic Big Data.

Thirdly, if the students received this data in real time and could immediately start modifying their behaviour in order to chase better marks then you would expect to see certain hallmark features of any closed complex system with direct feedback, e.g. oscillations, breakouts, convergence to a best solution, etc.

A truly interesting and quite Orwellian prospect.