BIG DATA PIONEER EXCITED ABOUT REINVENTING HUMAN SOCIETY
Alex ‘Sandy’ Pentland is one of the world’s most-cited computer scientists and was also named one of the world’s seven most powerful data scientists by Forbes. As a pioneer in Big Data, he discusses his distinctive view of the field, revealing his belief in the power of Big Data to inform about people’s behavior rather than just about their beliefs. Pentland is also interested in how that concept relates to business.
According to Pentland, Big Data is about consumer behavior, along with employee behavior, and how it all relates to individual businesses.
“It’s not about the things you post on Facebook, and it’s not about your searches on Google, which is what most people think about, and it’s not data from internal company processes and RFIDs. This sort of Big Data comes from things like location data off of your cell phone or credit card, it’s the little data breadcrumbs that you leave behind you as you move around in the world,”...
Because it is so important to understand these connections Asu Ozdaglar and I have recently created the MIT Center for Connection Science and Engineering, which spans all of the different MIT departments and schools. It's one of the very first MIT-wide Centers, because people from all sorts of specialties are coming to understand that it is the connections between people that is actually the core problem in making transportation systems work well, in making energy grids work efficiently, and in making financial systems stable. Markets are not just about rules or algorithms; they're about people and algorithms together. ...
Another important issue with Big Data is that since this data is mostly about people, there are enormous issues about privacy, data ownership, and data control. You can imagine using Big Data to make a world that is incredibly invasive, incredibly 'Big Brother'… George Orwell was not nearly creative enough when he wrote 1984.
For the last several years I've been helping to run sessions at the World Economic Forum around sourcing personal data and ownership of the data, and that's ended pretty successfully with what I call the New Deal on Data. The Chairman of the Federal Trade Commission, who's been part of the group, put forward the U.S. "Consumer Data Bill of Rights," and in the EU, the Justice Commissioner declared a version of this New Deal to be a basic human right. ...
See the full story here: http://www.edge.org/conversation/reinventing-society-in-the-wake-of-big-data