According to computer giant IBM, the world is churning out 2.5 quintillion bytes of data every day.

That is a lot of data spiraling in from mobile phones texts, social media sites, digital videos and pictures, GPS signals, company’s transaction records and lots more.

So much so that 90% of the data in the world today was created in the last two years.

This is Big Data and how to use this data to improve your business, make policy decisions for governments and local authorities is becoming a science – a computational social science.

A new generation of Big Data analysts are needed to help companies get the best out of the data they are producing as how businesses use the data it is churning out is becoming increasingly important.

“Technology is becoming ever more deeply interwoven into the fabric of society," says Tobias Preis, professor at Warwick Business School in the UK.

"The digital traces left behind by our interactions with technology offer an unprecedented opportunity for a better understanding of human behaviour and for companies to find out how their customers behave.

“Big online data can provide early warning signals for riots, election results, diseases spreading and responses to natural disasters.

"In the business world firms can exploit Big Data to find out quicker about consumer behaviour and economic or financial instability.

"Used well these rapidly growing data resources can give an insight into how people are behaving or even make it possible to anticipate major societal events.

Preis says the students within the industry need to know how to mine the gargantuan amount of data and analyse it, to produce something practical for businesses and governments to benefit from.

“Mining and using Big Data is going to become more and more important for companies and Governments,” Preis says.

"Every day five billion search requests are answered by Google alone and then there is Twitter, Flickr and other social media sites that provide extremely valuable complementary data for analytics of human decision making.

“The worldwide web is a huge database of human decision-making and human interaction, along with mobile phones and other digital traces. We can exploit this to aggregate human behaviour.”

And used properly Pries revealed how Wikipedia could have been used as early warning signs of stock market movements, while also believing that Big Data can help to even predict human behaviour.

“Learning how to use this data is of crucial importance to learn about the behaviour of people, and the rationality of how we behave economically," he says.

"We can use this as proper evidence for business decisions and for government policy and it is data that is very up-to-date, so up-to-date that it can be used to anticipate or in some cases even predict human behaviour.

"Learning how to do that will be useful for any business or organisation."