Big Data is all around us. It’s in the way we shop, do our finances, and tweet. What does Big Data even mean, you ask?
To some, it’s more information than your laptop can handle. Others define it as melding data from different sources and seeing what patterns emerge.
“I’m a photographer, so that didn’t mean much to me,” said Rick Smolan Oct. 15 here at the inaugural Wired Health Conference in New York.
Then the Against All Odds Productions CEO ran into Yahoo chief Marissa Mayer. She described Big Data, he said, as “watching the planet develop a nervous system.”
And that nervous system of data is developing at tremendous rates thanks to growth factors like social media, gadgets that record how much electricity each appliance in your house eats up, consumer genomics, and personal trackers like Fitbit, Zeo or the Nike fuel bracelet (a favorite among Wired staff, according to executive editor Thomas Goetz).
“The challenge is … how do you make it something [people] care about?” asked Smolan. As the popularity of Instagram indicates, often, the answer is pictures. So through the Human Face of Big Data, Smolan aims to morph abstract data points into something visceral, emotional and tangible. The crowd-sourced venture capitalizes “on humanity’s new ability to collect, analyze, triangulate and visualize vast amounts of data, in real time,” according to the project’s website.
via Wired
October 16, 2012
