Month: March 2015

Stewart Collis, CTO and co-founder of AWhere, recently tweeted a link to a video by the University of Minnesota’s Institute on the Environment, Big Question: Feast or Famine? The video highlights the increasing complexity of feeding our rapidly growing population, and Collis noted its relation to his work at AWhere. I recently caught up with … Continue reading Big data’s impact on global agriculture

The MIT Climate CoLab has announced 22 contests that seek high-impact ideas on how to tackle climate change. A project of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Center for Collective Intelligence, the Climate CoLab seeks to harness the knowledge and expertise of thousands of experts and non-experts across the world to help solve this massive, complex … Continue reading MIT Climate CoLab seeks high-impact ideas on how to tackle climate change

University of Pittsburgh chancellor Patrick Gallagher calls the volume of healthcare data in the United States “staggering.” “(It is) fast approaching a zettabyte,” Gallagher said, referencing the equivalent of one trillion gigabytes. “Even the terminology doesn’t make sense to many of us.” Gallagher made the comments Monday at a joint news conference with Carnegie Mellon University and … Continue reading Pitt, CMU and UPMC Announce Multimillion Dollar Health Care Data Research Initiative

The real legacy of SimCity is its attempt—and failure—to make complex systems the protagonists instead of people. Continue reading Video Games Are Better Without Characters

… After a ton of work like that, you have a nice set of data to which you fit simple statistical models and then it looks super easy to someone who either doesn’t know about the data collection and cleaning process or doesn’t care. This poses a major public relations problem for serious data scientists. … Continue reading Is Data Science Project Easy?

The Prime Minister’s Council for Science and Technology (www.gov.uk/cst) is looking at the UK Science Landscape. The aim of this project is to build a picture of the whole research landscape in the UK and to develop a stronger evidence base. This evidence base will help to inform future strategic decision-making and help the UK … Continue reading UK Knowledge Landscape

Trustee Jeffrey Lynford has a knack for pinpointing scientists and thinkers at the cutting edge of discovery. Since it was launched in 1998, the annual lecture series that bears his name has featured three Nobel laureates, two Turing Award winners, and a Fields medalist. On March 12, he added to that noteworthy roster when Eric … Continue reading LYNFORD LECTURER ERIC SCHADT USES BIG DATA TO CONSTRUCT PREDICTIVE MODELS OF DISEASE THAT COULD CHANGE THE FACE OF MEDICINE

The world’s largest hedge fund manager is banking on machines. Ray Dalio’s $165 billion Bridgewater Associates will start a new, artificial-intelligence unit next month with about half a dozen people, according to a person with knowledge of the matter. Continue reading Bridgewater Is Said to Start Artificial-Intelligence Team

The Wittgenstein Centre for Demography and Global Human Capital has created an interactive visualization of major migration patterns occurring from 1990-2010. The team behind the visualization used statistical missing data methods to approximate the true number of migrants, which is often difficult to identify due to illegal migration or varying recording and enforcement standards from country to … Continue reading Visualizing International Migration