WSJ on Big Data: Filtering Profits

Businesses must find ways to transform 'big data' into big money, or risk falling behind their competitors

By Nick Clayton WSJ June 29, 2011

Big data is a term bandied around the technology sector with great ease, but little precision. While exact definitions are hard to come by, what is clear is that the ability to gather, process and store huge amounts of data is unparalleled. The sheer quantity of information and the speed at which it is consumed means conventional methods of handling it are no longer sufficient.

According to analysts IDC, the amount of digital information created and replicated rose by 62% in 2010 to nearly 800,000 petabytes, which, IDC says, would fill a stack of DVDs reaching from the earth to the moon and back. By 2020, that pile of DVDs would stretchhalfway to Mars.

Nick Halstead, CEO of DataSift, a company that specializes in handling massive data, says the New York Stock Exchange produces one terabyte of data a day; Facebook generates in excess of 20 terabytes every day; while the CERN laboratory in Geneva produces more than 40 terabytes a day, or roughly twice the entire text content of the U.S. Library of Congress every day.

In its recent report, "Big data: The next frontier for innovation, competition and productivity", McKinsey Global Institute estimated that a retailer using big data could increase its operating margin by more than 60%. The U.S. could reduce its healthcare expenditure by 8% and government administrators in Europe could save more than €100 billion ($143 billion).

The definition MGI uses for big data is deliberately vague and not based on a specific number.

It refers instead to sets of data which are too large for current conventional database tools to capture, store, manage and analyze. It also takes account of the differences between sectors in the type of data and software available.

The ability to process this vast flow of data in real time will become a business imperative. In a traditional environment, information is gathered, put in a database, which is stored on a disc, and then indexed. Queries are then run against the database. But traditional databases are simply not up to the task of storing and handling the sheer quantity of data. It requires new types of databases able to span tens, hundreds, even thousands of servers. Yahoo, for example, runs a database cluster that spans 40,000 servers.

Advanced processing power is necessary in an environment where decisions are made in nanoseconds. At the very least, databases have to be stored in memory, demanding massive increases in server power and storage.
At its most extreme is a process called "complex event processing", which instead uses the flow of raw data and matches the query against it, looking for patterns. Typical uses of CEP include high-frequency financial trading, but other examples include sending a game player a special offer at exactly the right moment in a game, persuading them to make an in-game purchase.

This is a point picked up by Kristian Segerstrale, co-founder of social games company Playfish, who says: "Getting the information is important, but even more important will be the ability to react in real time to data and structure experiments to learn empirically from user behavior."

Ilja Laurs, the founder and chief executive of GetJar, the world's largest open mobile application store, says there is a point where, "the level of sophistication and optimization of various business processes starts to exceed a human's capacity to understand them".

Data Mining
He says: "Today, algorithms, used for positioning products in supermarkets to presenting a dynamic price grid when you book a flight ticket to maximize flight occupancy, are becoming critical to every business. To achieve the next step in efficiency it's necessary to build data mining, machine learning, optimization algorithms for every business."

Some remain skeptical about the current claims being made for big data. They point out that not all data is created equal and that, according to IDC, the fastest growing type of data is unstructured in the form of e-mails, instant messages and other "human-friendly data".

This may not be appropriate for some of the much-vaunted new tools for analyzing big data, such as in-memory database technology. This is extremely fast because it does not have to read and write from a disc: "But if you have a paragraph of an email and you put that into an in-memory database it has no more idea of what it means than an in-disc database," says Mike Lynch, chief executive of Autonomy. "If, in a few years time, they do manage to develop tools for analysis of human-friendly data, it will offer great insights into the way organizations are run, but we're not there yet," he says.
The Expert's View: Oliver Bussmann, SAP

Advances in hardware and software will finally lead to the arrival of the "real" real-time enterprise, according to Oliver Bussmann chief information officer at SAP: "In the next few years you'll see 30, 40 or even 50 terabytes of main memory RAM combined with up to 1000 cores in processors, which means you'll be able to do massive parallel processing. At the same time, advances allow data compression of up to 10 times. The price is coming down too."

What does this mean? "Processing that now takes hours or even days can happen in seconds. This will have a huge impact on predictive analytics, seeing what will be the best course of action based on access to historical and current data," he says.
"It will also remove the limitations on accessing information. Instead of having access to just a subset of data, your sales team, for example, will have all the organization's customer relationship management information and be able to change how they query it on the fly," he says.

"Accounting systems will change because you'll be able to move away from overnight processing to real time. There'll be no time limitation because you'll have the processing power." All this will be combined with an enormous growth in the volume of data coming into the enterprise. There are risks: "If you have the power to analyze everything, security is very important. If somebody hacks into this environment, all the information is there for them. You also have to make sure your system of records is properly in place. You can't just think this new technology will solve all your data problems. If the right foundation is not there, all it will mean is you can see the garbage even faster."

Health IT Exchange and Analytics: The Final Frontiers

Thursday, June 16, 2011
by Jennifer Covich Bordenick

In the 10 years since the eHealth Initiative was established, we have witnessed unparalleled growth and enthusiasm for health IT solutions. The progress we have made is undeniable.

Over the last decade, the number of health information exchange initiatives grew from a couple dozen to more than 250. We have witnessed three national coordinators for health IT lead the industry in different and significant ways. Most importantly, we have seen a dramatic uptick in electronic health record adoption levels from single digits in 2001 to nearly a quarter of clinicians now using EHRs.

According to CDC, approximately 25% of office-based physicians had access to a "basic" EHR system in 2010. Moreover, patients better understand the need for connectivity, as evidenced by recent surveys. The majority of patients see health information exchange as a necessity, as evidenced by an April Commonwealth Fund survey that found 92% of patient respondents agree it is important for physicians to be able to share data electronically with other physicians.

A confluence of events made all of this possible: money, policy and technology. A huge infusion of federal money -- $27 billion -- for meaningful use helped kick start efforts in the private sector. Public-private sector policy efforts began with the federal advisory body American Health Information Community in 2005; they have continued with the Health IT Policy Committee and Health IT Standards Committee. And, finally, technology and timing have played a key role in our success. With the advent of social media, PDAs and "apps" over the last decade, patients are open to technology now more than ever. 

According to a 2011 Pew Internet and American Life Project/California HealthCare Foundation survey, of the 74% of U.S. residents who use the Internet, 80% have looked online for health information about one of 15 health topics, such as a specific disease or treatment.

The progress we have made to date has been hard fought and expensive and the growing pains have been severe, but the real promise has yet to be realized. If you talk to a cancer patient waiting for information to be sent from a lab, a public health official trying to track the source of an outbreak, a sick patient waiting months and years for a clinical trial to wrap up or any mother toting around paper copies of immunization forms -- you will find many health care users who have yet to see the promise realized. 
It's time for the nation to double down on the health IT bet, redouble our efforts and take it to the next level. Why? Because the next ten years will make or break this industry, the next decade will be even more challenging than the last one.

Expectations are exceedingly high. Everyone, including politicians, is looking for proof that health IT improves care, outcomes and reduces cost, proof that our investment financially and politically was worth it. We have raised expectations for good reason; we know it works. Those of us who work in the industry have seen the results, but we have done a bad job of communicating the successes. More importantly, we have stopped focusing on what we are going to do with the data. We have stopped talking about why it is so important that we have this data.

Getting to the next level requires two things: exchange and analytics.

Health information exchange, that old familiar phrase, is back in the spotlight. It is not good enough to store information in a deluxe EHR. Health information needs to move, it has to be accessible to the specialist, connect to your smartphone app, flow from your home device, transfer to your pharmacy and download into your personal device -- so that you can use the data. Because without "exchange," all of this talk about EHRs is not very useful. Health information needs to move with patients, so patients and doctors can use the data.

Lastly, analytics remains the final frontier we need to conquer. Right now, we have an overwhelming volume of data from a multitude of sources. The culmination of recent efforts will exponentially increase the amount of data. The real promise of health IT was never about the technology, it was always about leveraging the data. We need to safely and securely aggregate, stratify, investigate, test and dish out the data in 10 different ways for clinical researchers, public health and, of course, patient care.

Given the groundwork we established over the last 10 years, public sentiment, new regulations and the investments that have been made, we are on the right track. All of these things will make faster progress possible in the next 10 years. Let's be sure to keep a clear focus on the promise of the data.

MORE ON THE WEB
·       Federal Health IT Strategic Plan
·       "A Call for Change: The 2011 Commonwealth Fund Survey of Public Views of the U.S. Health System" (4/2011).
·       CDC survey on EHR adoption

Read more: http://www.ihealthbeat.org/perspectives/2011/exchange-and-analytics-the-final-frontiers.aspx#ixzz1PZ3NagCh

A. Huffington: The Internet Grows Up: Goodbye Messy Adolescence

Arriana Huffington     HuffPost    June 16, 2011

I'm off to take part in the 58th Annual Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity. Tim Armstrong and I will be speaking on a theme that we have been talking a lot about lately -- the fact that the Internet has grown up.

Its adolescence was, like most formative years, filled with late nights, video games, loud music, junk food, and trying to figure out exactly what it wanted to be when it grew up.

Now, it has matured to the point where our online and our offline lives have merged.

Indeed, the qualities we care most about offline are being increasingly reflected in our experience online. We're leaving behind worshiping at the altar of algorithms and entering a brave new world of community, connections and engagement.

And the companies and brands that succeed in the coming years will be those that most take advantage of the fact that there is increasingly little distinction between "virtual reality" and, well, reality. People don't want to give up their humanity when they go online. The Internet is no longer a "virtual" public space where we have the semblance of connection -- it's a real public space where we really connect.

Remember all those scary movies about how humans were going to become machines in the future? Well, as it turned out, the machines ended up enabling us to be more human instead.

The long prelude to this coming-of-age moment has been a time of amazing change. We have watched the Web evolve to meet our hunger for connection and community. But it hasn't always been easy. As Clay Shirky recently noted, history shows that changes in the way we relate to information are inevitably accompanied by resistance. "Every increase in freedom to create or consume media," he wrote, "from paperback books to YouTube, alarms people accustomed to the restrictions of the old system, convincing them that the new media will make young people stupid." It was, after all, predicted that the printing press would lead to "chaos and the dismemberment of European intellectual life."

And yes, along with our increased access to ideas, information -- and each other -- comes the tendency to create what Shirky calls "throwaway material." And the Internet is certainly no slouch at producing throwaway material -- a tendency that won't be going away. But something else has emerged among all the random searching: a search for greater meaning.

We're now more thoughtful and deliberate about choosing our friends and how we spend our online time. Adulthood is a time when our lives become about curating, selecting, saying "no" more often than we say "yes," being forced to decide what we really value, realizing what's really important to us. Increasingly, that's exactly how people are using the Internet as well.

To be sure, the adolescent Internet will always be with us. But now there's a choice -- not just for individuals, but for companies as well. One way forward is to continue down the path where noise and half-truths trump facts, where confusion and data overload overwhelm any possibility of balance and wisdom. The other way is to stake out a place in this new world of community, connections and collaboration.

The Internet of the future, the mature, grown-up Internet, has the potential to take what's best about the human experience -- our passion, our knowledge, our desire to connect -- and channel it into an online experience that truly resonates with how people live.

The bridge to this more connected, more human future is to be found in directing our energy and resources to the foundational pillars of trust, authenticity and engagement -- principles that can help all of us navigate the world, whether it's the real world or the World Wide Web.

Let's start with trust:

In the newer, more mature, more human Internet, trust isn't something that comes because an old institution or authority figure demands it. It comes the same way it comes offline: It's born out of connection and relationships. If brands and institutions want to have our trust, it must be earned, and then continually maintained -- the same way it is in relationships we have in the offline world.

Truth is an important element of trust, but truth isn't just about facts. As NYU professor Jay Rosen says, "information alone will not inform us." Information free from any context isn't meaningful to us and is not going to be trusted. So those who supply the context to the facts and information become extremely important. We know where our friends are coming from, we know who they are. So the information we get from them is more trusted.

The second pillar of the mature Internet is authenticity.

As users of the Web have become increasingly overwhelmed with information, and with competing messages, so too have they become increasingly sophisticated about sorting out the real from the fake, the genuine from the manufactured. The modern media landscape requires authenticity in order to make an impact.

In the new, grown-up Internet, the ordering principle is social, not hierarchical. It's person-to-person, not top-down. And social media turns out to be an incredible tool for recognizing, building and fostering authenticity. That's what it's about -- and this holds true not just for individual users, but for brands as well.
New media and social media tools have enabled people to shift their focus from passive observation to active participation -- millions worldwide now want in on the creative process and have much to contribute to it. And companies are eager to use that passion and connection. But it's a two-way street. Through social media, people tell companies who they are and what they value, and companies also tell people who they are and what their values are. And increasingly, companies that have both of those figured out have also figured out that doing good is good business.

Our third pillar is engagement... the grown-up Internet is all about engagement and community -- after all, we're social animals. The human desire for connectedness is universal. The Knight Foundation and Gallup recently conducted a survey to find out what emotionally attaches people to a community. The results were instructive -- and they were consistent, from people in big cities to those living in small towns. The study found that the key drivers of people's emotional attachment to where they live are: an area's physical beauty, opportunities for socializing and a community's openness to all people.

That's just as true online as off. People will eventually find a way to make any activity into a tool for engagement, connection and community, and the Internet is the most effective tool for community building the world has ever seen. In fact, this invention -- this thing we think of as a piece of technology or a series of machines -- is now at the stage where it's actually allowing us to tap into our full humanity.

So now that the Internet has arrived at adulthood, the next stage will be what we euphemistically call the Golden Years. That Internet won't have the drawbacks of our old age, but I'm hoping it will have its main benefit: wisdom.

Computer Science's 'Sputnik Moment'?

Introduction
Computer science is a hot major again. It had been in the doldrums after the dot-com bust a decade ago, but with the social media gold rush and the success of "The Social Network," computer science departments are transforming themselves to meet the demand. At Harvard, the size of the introductory computer science class has nearly quadrupled in five years.

The spike has raised hopes of a ripple effect throughout the American education system -- so much so that Mehran Sahami, the associate chairman for computer science at Stanford, can envision "a national call, a Sputnik moment."

What would a "Sputnik moment" entail today? Will the surge of students into computer science last, and could it help raise American educational achievement?

Debate at http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2011/06/15/computer-sciences-sputnik-moment?ref=opinion
Some taking part of the debate below:

Thinking Beyond the Bubble
Updated June 16, 2011, 02:24 AM

Vivek Wadhwa is a visiting scholar at University of California, Berkeley, senior research associate at Harvard Law School and director of research at the Center for Entrepreneurship and Research Commercialization at Duke University. Follow him on Twitter at @wadhwa.
As we learned from the last technology bubble — the dot-com era — high-flying tech careers can be very seductive. When students started reading about the young millionaires of that era, they flocked to computer science, and enrollments reached record levels. And then the bubble burst, and so did enrollments.

Social media apps are cool, but what do they have to do with saving the world?
We’re in the middle of a new bubble now, with a fresh set of millionaires. There is little doubt that this will burst and enrollments will drop again. And we’ll have another generation of students who joined computer science for the wrong reasons.

If we want a real Sputnik moment, we need to create the same demand — and excitement — we had for engineers and scientists in the ’60s, when it seemed that the nation’s survival was at stake. Parents encouraged their children to become scientists; the president told us it was a national priority; and we made huge investments. Science was sexy, chic and essential.

Social media apps such as the ones these kids want to learn how to develop are cool, but not earth-shattering. Students are flocking to computer science because they dream of being the next Mark Zuckerberg, not of saving the world. This burst of enrollments is the equivalent of a sugar high.

It is not that we don’t have real problems to fix. Our economy is still in a slump; greenhouse gases threaten to turn the earth into a giant steam room; scarce natural resources like food, water and oil have already become international flash points as the developing and developed worlds jockey for position to sustain or improve their standards of living. Drug-resistant bacteria threaten us with doomsday plagues. In other words, if there ever was a time for a Scientific Renaissance, now is it.

By the time these computer science majors graduate, we may be in the middle of yet another tech bubble, so these kids may do O.K. But we will not have made any progress toward fixing the real problems and may have celebrated for nothing.

Encourage More Hackathons

June 15, 2011

Jonathan Zittrain is a professor at Harvard Law School and a professor of computer science at the university's School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. He is a co-founder of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society.

Educating students or the general public about computer science isn't easy. Teaching theory can be interesting and mind-expanding, but it may be no more applicable in most people's lives and careers than high school algebra or calculus. Teaching specific programming languages for more concrete purposes can risk having students lose sight of the bigger picture, confining them to rote work without much prospect for intellectual growth.

The creators of many game-changing inventions were not computer science majors.

That bigger picture is what makes mastery of today's technology so special: unlike many other fields of endeavor, anyone with an idea can try it out and garner an audience around it without having to ink a business plan or raise prohibitive amounts of money. Thanks to PCs that run any software they're given, and an Internet that allows anyone to set up shop and start communicating with the world without having to do the equivalent of buying a television broadcast tower and license, we've seen amazing and disruptive ventures from humble beginnings.

Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web by writing the code for a browser and a Web server and seeing if the world wanted to take it up. No business model, venture capital rounds, or patents were involved. Ward Cunningham invented something called a wiki, where people could collectively edit a document. Jimmy Wales used it to create Wikipedia, a project that was considered foolish at first but has completely reshaped the way people document and share information about the world.

Even the Internet and PC came from unexpected origins. The inventors of the Internet protocol were experimenting; they didn't know what would be done with the network. The Internet didn't and doesn't have a "main menu," but rather, it is raw connectivity waiting for its users to do something with it -- to connect with one another.

The inventors of the first consumer PC -- Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs -- unveiled an Apple II in 1977 that had a blinking cursor instead of bundled software; other technologists were de facto invited to design applications and then share or sell them to one another. (Two years later, to Apple's surprise, the personal computer became a business when Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston invented VisiCalc, the first digital spreadsheet, and companies around the world suddenly craved PCs.)

What's notable about most of these and other game-changing inventions is that their creators mostly weren't computer science majors. They were self-taught or learned their craft through apprenticeship to other coders.

Computer science curricula that lack the spirit of exploration and experimentation -- that stick too closely to the textbooks, whether ones of theory or practice -- won't speed the overall pace of innovation. That's why all-night hackathons are good ideas: they encourage people to see that the world can be changed, and that a small but determined handful of people can do it.
Our challenge is to keep alive Sputnik's rallying cry in a world where coding is becoming more confined.

Sputnik itself was first tracked not by professionally trained astronomers but by bands of amateurs spread across the nation, heeding a call to build or acquire their own telescopes and to document what they saw. Our challenge is to keep alive Sputnik's rallying cry in a world where coding is becoming more confined. Web servers where new ideas might take root are consolidating under a few corporate hosts. Today's coders are naturally more interested in writing for the Facebook or Apple iOS platforms, where truly disruptive ideas can be banned or diminished by gatekeepers who want to protect their own business models, or are compelled to carry water for other regulatory purposes.

The reason to teach computer science isn't to turn everyone into a coder. It's to share the insight that today, more than ever, the world can be shaped by good and rigorous ideas hatched by "mere" teenagers or other outsiders, and that these ideas transcend technology.

There's a social and legal dimension to this as well. That's why computer science should include a look at the policy implications of the codes we forge. Moreover, computer science education shouldn't be limited to college. Programs like the Sprouts help make the craft available to everyone, empowering people to affect the world rather than merely marveling at shiny gizmos.

A Key to Critical Thinking

Updated June 15, 2011, 09:15 PM

Ed Lazowska holds the Bill and Melinda Gates chair in computer science and engineering at the University of Washington.

Students are starting to realize that advances in computer science are central to achieving many of our national priorities – in energy, education, health care, national and homeland security, scientific discovery and open government.

As more fields become information fields, "computational thinking” is necessary for success in just about any endeavor.

As more fields become information fields, facility with what we call "computational thinking” is necessary for success in just about any endeavor. Once, the principal qualification for a career in linguistics was the ability to speak multiple languages; but along came Noam Chomsky with transformational grammar, and the world changed. Once, biology was taxonomy; then Watson and Crick discovered that the human genome was a digital code that could be read, deciphered, modified and rewritten. Once, sociologists studied the formation, evolution and dissolution of cliques by paying undergraduates to participate in focus groups; today they mine half a billion users’ worth of Facebook data.

Computer science is a superb preparation for just about anything. And within technology industries, there are plentiful jobs. Those who choose to work in the computing field find it characterized by highly interactive teams that are focused on solving real life problems. The Dilbert stereotype is surely dead.

For students who want to change the world, there is no field with greater impact or leverage than computer science. Just take a look at the 2010 report by the President's Council of Advisers on Science and Technology, which characterized computer science as “arguably unique among all fields of science and engineering in the breadth of its impact.”

Despite all of this good news, we need a national re-commitment to education, innovation, science and engineering. All the facts suggest that we are losing our edge.

NAF Sam Wainwright : Revolutionary communication innovations

By Sam Wainwright – Special to CNN   June 10, 2011

Editor's Note: Sam Wainwright is a Research Associate at the New America Foundation. This post is part of the Global Innovation Showcase created by the New America Foundation and the Global Public Square

New communications tools and behaviors are spurring innovation worldwide, revolutionizing finance, community, business, giving and government.  Here are some fascinating examples:

Finance: Mobile phone technology is empowering individuals to directly exchange money through their cell phones, bypassing traditional banking institutions. Companies like Square and their headphone-jack card reader let anyone with a smart phone accept credit card payments.

Mobile banking has developed even faster and spread far wider around the world. In Kenya, M-PESA connects over 65% of households to mobile money services. Websites like Kiva.org turn individuals into micro-financiers, allowing them to make $25 loans to anyone in the world.

Community: P2P technology is also facilitating near-free global communication through technology like Voice over IP (VoIP), turning even niche marketplaces into global exchanges.
Start-ups like Speak Shop, a web-based marketplace of Latin America Spanish tutors, allow  anyone, anywhere to brush up on their Español via Skype.

Alternative “mesh” Internet architectures are also emerging as challengers to traditional notions of centralized, institutional control over the web. When the Egyptian government attempted to shut down the country’s Internet last February, Egyptian hackers turned to mesh networking to bypass the blackout.

Business: People aren’t the only ones connecting in new ways. There are new direct company-to-person interactions, whether as simple as announcing deals on Twitter, or as complex as a Spiroxil’s system for detecting counterfeit prescription drugs in the developing world with a cellphone camera.

Companies are connecting with new workforces by crowdsourcing small tasks with Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, or by partnering with not-for-profits like Samasource to build sustainable internet-based jobs for people in poverty.

Giving: Charities have also benefited. Direct giving through text messages became a major source of international philanthropy – especially disaster relief – following the Haitian earthquake last year. Meanwhile, sites like GlobalGiving connect individual donors to grassroots charity projects with unprecedented levels of transparency and accountability.

A free service called ChildCount+ uses text messaging to coordinate community-based health providers in Africa. Beside providing for the social good of improving the delivery of health care, ChildCount+ means more patients end up coming back for follow-up appointments.

Government: Lower barriers to communication are also allowing individuals to hold governments accountable in ways never before possible. Ushahidi maps have been revolutionary in increasing government transparency. The free and open-source software allows anyone to report location-tagged information, and has been tweaked to track everything from street violence in Kenya to infrastructure damage from the Haitian earthquake. Residents of D.C. even used it to track snow removal during 2010’s “snowmaggedon.”

Perhaps most strikingly, many of these new interactions begin with the ethos of “free” and seek out new ways to monetize innovation outside of traditional cash-for-goods-rendered transactions. For example, Ushahidi software generates revenue by offering set-up and hosting services.

As Chris Anderson noted in his book Free: The Future of a Radical Price, “free” is “a word with an extraordinary ability to reset consumer psychology, create new markets, break old ones and make almost any product more attractive."

Taken together, all these breakthroughs suggest that the truly innovative work in the global economy is increasingly divorced from traditional models of individual ownership and old boundaries of communication. Indeed, new forms of communication are leading the way.

Over-the-Horizon Opportunities and Challenges for National Security and Privacy

The Bipartisan Policy Center and
The Center for Democracy and Technology
Invite you to a discussionThe Emerging Reality of Big Data: Over-the-Horizon Opportunities and Challenges for National Security and Privacy

Keynote Address by: Representative Mike Rogers (R-MI)
Chairman, House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence

Followed by panel discussions with leaders in the federal government, industry, academia and privacy communities.

Speakers include:Vicki Jo McBee, CIO, National Counterterrorism Center
  Mary Ellen Callahan, Chief Privacy Officer, DHS
Alex Karp, CEO, Palantir Technologies Peter Cullen, Chief Privacy Strategist, Microsoft
Tuesday, June 14, 2011
9:00AM-12:00PM
Continental breakfast available at 8:30AM.
Agenda to follow.

U.S. Capitol Visitor Center
Room HVC 200

Click here to register.Invitation is non-transferable.
Event is closed to press.

  In 2007, former U.S. Senate Majority Leaders Howard Baker, Tom Daschle, Bob Dole, and George Mitchell formed the Bipartisan Policy Center (BPC) to develop and promote solutions that can attract the public support and political momentum to achieve real progress. Currently, the BPC focuses on issues including health care, energy, national and homeland security, transportation and economic policy. For more information, please visit our website: www.bipartisanpolicy.org.

BIG Data and Economist Conference

Ideas Economy: Information is a fresh look at knowledge management for the information age.


Date:  7 June 2011 - 11:00am - 8 June 2011 - 6:00pm
Location:  Santa Clara Convention Center
5001 Great America Parkway
Santa Clara 95054

Watch Live Webcast at fora.tv


The era of big data presents incredible opportunities—smarter cities, stronger companies, faster medicine—but just as many challenges. Storage is scarce, systems overloaded, governments and businesses know too much. The world now contains unimaginably vast amounts of digital information, which is growing exponentially. Managed well, this data can be used to engineer new engines of economic value, unlock scientific breakthroughs, and hold politicians accountable. Managed poorly, it can cause great harm. The financial crisis showed that complex models that analyse large quantities of data do not always reflect financial risk in the real world. The financial crisis was sparked by big data—and there will be others.

But the data deluge will also generate millions of new ideas for how to solve big problems, build new markets, and expand existing ones. Ideas Economy: Information is a fresh look at knowledge management for the information age.

The Economist will bring together theorists, strategists, and innovators who understand how to harness data to create value and advance individual, corporate, and social good. We will sift through the vast quantities of current thinking on data to uncover the best ways forward. And we will apply the lessons of the Ideas Economy, about innovation, human capital, and intelligent infrastructure, to uncover new sources of growth and accelerate human progress across the globe.

For more information, visit: http://ideas.economist.com/event/information

UK: Connect: Patients and the Power of Data

May 30, 2011

Source: Young Foundation (UK)

Information is the lifeblood of high quality healthcare. There have been huge technological advances about how it can be used and by whom, which have been under utilised by the NHS. It is now possible to give people control over their own data. If this were done, it would have the potential to revolutionise healthcare delivery for patients, their families and carers.

This discussion paper sets out seven practical ways and examples, each of which the Young Foundation believes would transform health care delivery. These could improve patient experiences, reduced errors and omissions, improve communication and make healthcare more efficient and effective. 

+ Direct link to document (PDF; 2.4 MB)