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Editor-in-Chief: Zoran Obradovic, PhD

Impact Factor: 4.6* *2022 Journal Citation Reports™ (Clarivate, 2023)

Citescore™: 6.9.

The leading peer-reviewed journal covering the challenges and opportunities in collecting, analyzing, and disseminating vast amounts of data.

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New special issue, big data analytics in industrial intelligence.

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Aims & Scope

Big Data is the leading peer-reviewed journal covering the challenges and opportunities in collecting, analyzing, and disseminating vast amounts of data. The Journal addresses questions surrounding this powerful and growing field of data science and facilitates the efforts of researchers, business managers, analysts, developers, data scientists, physicists, statisticians, infrastructure developers, academics, and policymakers to improve operations, profitability, and communications within their businesses and institutions. Spanning a broad array of disciplines focusing on novel big data technologies, policies, and innovations, the Journal brings together the community to address current challenges and enforce effective efforts to organize, store, disseminate, protect, manipulate, and, most importantly, find the most effective strategies to make this incredible amount of information work to benefit society, industry, academia, and government.

Big Data coverage includes:

• Big data industry standards
• New technologies being developed specifically for big data
• Data acquisition, cleaning, distribution, and best practices
• Data protection, privacy, and policy 
• Business interests from research to product
• The changing role of business intelligence
• Visualization and design principles of big data infrastructures
• Physical interfaces and robotics
• Social networking advantages for Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, Google, etc.
• Opportunities around big data and how companies can harness it to their advantage

Big Data is under the editorial leadership of Editor-in-Chief Zoran Obradovic, PhD , Temple University, and other leading investigators. View the entire editorial board .

Audience: Data miners, computer scientists, statisticians, researchers, chief data scientists, database engineers, software engineers, web developers, policy makers, CEOs of data startups, professors of computer science, mathematics, physics, statistics, and computational biology, among others.

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Special Issue: Big Data Analytics in Industrial Intelligence

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Journal of Computational Biology

Purdue lab revolutionizes humanities research through big data analysis

The Tuesday after spring break, students from Purdue University’s Computational Social Science Lab eagerly gathered on the second floor of Beering Hall to continue their research. The lab is one of the first of its kind to research the social sciences through the analysis of “big data.” 

“We’re interested in how we can utilize audio, video and unconventional forms of data to understand things like people’s preferences to policy,” enthuses political science professor Bryce Dietrich, who runs the lab.

Dietrich and his students have spent upwards of a year analyzing unconventional data sources to answer big social science questions, like how people interact with gender in public and how often politicians cross the aisle. Political science graduate student Jasper Neath and his team are evaluating how different genders interact with each other using photos intended for training self-driving vehicles. 

“We have a huge data set of nearly 100,000 images from Mercedes dash cams in European cities,” Neath says. “We have the 3D coordinates of the pedestrians in all these cities, and we can use them to see how different genders interact.”

Currently, Neath and his team are in the process of labeling and analyzing the data and are far from reaching conclusions on their research. Still, they say they have learned much in such an interdisciplinary environment like the Computational Social Science Lab. 

“As computer science majors, typically we just work with computers all day,” explains junior Hardit Sandhu. “However, working in the social sciences and learning how humans interact has been eye-opening.”

Sandhu, who works with Neath, said the lab inspired him to look into more human-centric careers in computer science after college. He joined the lab after taking a class with Deitrich called Data and Public Policy, which integrates political science concepts into discussions about emerging technologies. 

“The class was meant for political science students who want to learn about machine learning and AI,” Dietrich says. “But I swear every time I teach it, I have students embedded in STEM fields who want a break from doing the problem sets.”

Michael Lenkeit, a sophomore studying computer science, says the lab offers him just that.

“Most of what I have done in computer science has been extremely theoretical and abstract,” Lenkeit explains. “It’s really cool to get involved in a project from the ground up and see how technology is being used in a practical context.”

STEM majors aren’t the only students utilizing the Computational Social Science Lab’s resources. Political science and applied statistics major Lynlee Rice is analyzing interactions of journalists, politicians and academics on news sites like CNN.

“We know that men often dominate the conversation,” says Myriam Shiran, the postdoctoral research associate leading the project. “They make up around 60% of everything being said. However, we found that women journalists are most likely to interrupt a conversation.”

Rice says that the work she has conducted in the lab so far has helped her learn more tools she will utilize in the future. 

“I want to pursue polling research in the future, so I find this very helpful in learning how to use statistics in a political science context,” she says. “In my future career, I want to use data to figure out what kind of issues politicians should talk about and who they should talk to.”

The Computational Social Science Lab exemplifies Purdue University’s commitment to preparing Boilermakers for their future careers while bridging the gap between technology and the humanities. By emphasizing interdisciplinary education, the lab not only expands students’ academic horizons but also equips them with the skills and perspectives needed to be leaders and innovators in an increasingly interconnected world.

Last updated : April 5, 2024

Author : Malini Nair, AI Communication Assistant for Student Success Programs, [email protected]

Mapping Science and Innovation

Maps have been helping us understand the world we live in for centuries. In the age of big data, maps have become an essential visualization tool for uncovering geopolitical relationships and patterns in data.

SCImago Maps is a technology developed by SCImago Lab for the development of products for the analysis and visualization of scientific research and innovation data.

• MapLibre GL JS ( License )
• Natural Earth Data ( Terms of Use )
• Tippecanoe ( License )
• quadtree-js ( License )
• mapbox-gl-rtl-text.js ( License )
• naturalearthtiles ( License )
• mapbox-gl-styles ( License )
• OSM Liberty ( License )
• TileServer PHP ( License )
• Open Sans Font ( License )
• Noto Sans Font ( License )

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by Scimago Lab

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‘Garbage Lasagna’: Dumps Are a Big Driver of Warming, Study Says

Decades of buried trash is releasing methane, a powerful greenhouse gas, at higher rates than previously estimated, the researchers said.

By Hiroko Tabuchi

They’re vast expanses that can be as big as towns: open landfills where household waste ends up, whether it’s vegetable scraps or old appliances.

These landfills also belch methane, a powerful, planet-warming gas, on average at almost three times the rate reported to federal regulators, according to a study published Thursday in the journal Science.

The study measured methane emissions at roughly 20 percent of 1,200 or so large, operating landfills in the United States. It adds to a growing body of evidence that landfills are a significant driver of climate change, said Riley Duren, founder of the public-private partnership Carbon Mapper, who took part in the study.

“We’ve largely been in the dark, as a society, about actual emissions from landfills,” said Mr. Duren, a former NASA engineer and scientist. “This study pinpoints the gaps.”

Methane emissions from oil and gas production , as well as from livestock, have come under increasing scrutiny in recent years. Like carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas that’s warming the world, methane acts like a blanket in the sky, trapping the sun’s heat.

And though methane lasts for a shorter time in the atmosphere than carbon dioxide, it is more potent. Its warming effect is more than 80 times as powerful as the same amount of carbon dioxide over a 20-year period.

The Environmental Protection Agency estimates that landfills are the third largest source of human-caused methane emissions in the United States, emitting as much greenhouse gas as 23 million gasoline cars driven for a year.

But those estimates have been largely based on computer modeling, rather than direct measurements. A big reason: It can be difficult and even dangerous for workers with methane “sniffers” to measure emissions on-site, walking up steep slopes or near active dump sites.

Organic waste like food scraps can emit copious amounts of methane when they decompose under conditions lacking oxygen, which can happen deep in landfills. Composting, on the other hand, generally doesn’t produce methane, which is why experts say it can be effective in reducing methane emissions.

For the new study, scientists gathered data from airplane flyovers using a technology called imaging spectrometers designed to measure concentrations of methane in the air. Between 2018 and 2022, they flew planes over 250 sites across 18 states, about 20 percent of the nation’s open landfills.

At more than half the landfills they surveyed, researchers detected emissions hot spots, or sizable methane plumes that sometimes lasted months or years. That suggested something had gone awry at the site, like a big leak of trapped methane from layers of long-buried, decomposing trash, the researchers said.

“You can sometimes get decades of trash that’s sitting under the landfill,” said Daniel H. Cusworth, a climate scientist at Carbon Mapper and the University of Arizona, who led the study. “We call it a garbage lasagna.”

Many landfills are fitted with specialized wells and pipes that collect the methane gas that seeps out of rotting garbage in order to either burn it off or sometimes to use it to generate electricity or heat. But those wells and pipes can leak.

The researchers said pinpointing leaks doesn’t just help scientists get a better picture of emissions, it also helps landfill operators fix leaks.

Overseas, the picture can be less clear, particularly in countries where landfills aren’t strictly regulated. Previous surveys using satellite technology have estimated that globally, landfill methane makes up nearly 20 percent of human-linked methane emissions.

“The waste sector clearly is going to be a critical part of society’s ambition to slash methane emissions,” said Mr. Duren of Carbon Mapper. “We’re not going to meet the global methane pledge targets just by slashing oil and gas emissions.”

A growing constellation of methane-detecting satellites could provide a fuller picture. Last month, another nonprofit, the Environmental Defense Fund, launched MethaneSat , a satellite dedicated to tracking methane emissions around the world.

Carbon Mapper, with partners including NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Rocky Mountain Institute, and the University of Arizona, intends to launch the first of its own methane-tracking satellites later this year.

Hiroko Tabuchi covers the intersection of business and climate for The Times. She has been a journalist for more than 20 years in Tokyo and New York. More about Hiroko Tabuchi

Learn More About Climate Change

Have questions about climate change? Our F.A.Q. will tackle your climate questions, big and small .

The Italian energy giant Eni sees future profits from collecting carbon dioxide and pumping it into  natural gas fields that have been exhausted.

”Buying Time,” a new series from The New York Times, looks at the risky ways  humans are starting to manipulate nature  to fight climate change.

Ocean Conservation Namibia is disentangling a record number of seals, while broadcasting the perils of marine debris in a largely feel-good way. Here’s how .

New satellite-based research reveals how land along the East Coast is slumping into the ocean, compounding the danger from global sea level rise . A major culprit: the overpumping of groundwater.

Did you know the ♻ symbol doesn’t mean something is actually recyclable ? Read on about how we got here, and what can be done.

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Annual Journal Metrics

2022 Citation Impact 8.1 - 2-year Impact Factor 5.095 - SNIP (Source Normalized Impact per Paper) 2.714 - SJR (SCImago Journal Rank)

2023 Speed 56 days submission to first editorial decision for all manuscripts (Median) 205 days submission to accept (Median)

2023 Usage  2,559,548 downloads 280 Altmetric mentions

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• ISSN: 2196-1115 (electronic)