In 1998, I was attending a conference when an astronomer that I knew from across the country sought me out and asked if his group could send the data from their large astronomy experiment to NASA’s ADF (Astrophysics Data Facility, where I was working at the time). Their data set was two Terabytes in total. That seemed big (like the birth of “Astronomy Big Data”) to me, especially for 1998, but I didn’t know how big until I went back to work a few days later. When I mentioned this opportunity to the NASA facility senior managers, they looked at me like I was unaware of something really obvious and important. They were right! They “reminded” me that the data facility was the home for 15,000 NASA space science mission data sets, and the aggregate sum total data volume for all of those data sets combined(!) was less than one Terabyte! They couldn’t possibly accept one single experiment’s data that single-handedly eclipsed the total volume of all of the other 15,000 experiments’ data sets combined.

Well, this was embarrassing! What could we do? I was told that ADF could accept the data if I would write a research grant proposal and win some funds to pay for all of the new I.T. resources that would be required. “What kind of research proposal would pay for such a thing?” I asked myself. This led me to investigate a field of research that I had only briefly heard in conversation once or twice previously — Data Mining (= Machine Learning applied to large data sets). The more I read about this topic (now called Data Science), the more I became convinced that this is what I wanted to do for the rest of my research career. I was hooked. I was at the right place at the right time…

(continue reading here … https://www.mapr.com/blog/growth-hackers-journey-right-place-right-time)

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