Big Data and Ethics

BIG Data and Ethics was held a few weeks ago in the new premises of the DigitYser, downtown Brussels. It was a great Meetup, with interesting speakers and an interested public 😉 It’s always a pleasure when the public can contribute and presentations raise great discussions, and it is more important here on this gathering Read More …

New year’s resolution: Apply the 8-Day Data Detox Kit

We are approaching the end of the year. For most of us this is the time to Last Year’s introspection and New Year’s big resolutions…(and if you don’t usually do it I recommend it to you: time flies (!) and taking the wheel of your life brings you a lovely sense of realisation 🙂 Have you Read More …

Pre-Crime unit for tracking Terrorists?

Due to last events in Belgium, the terrorist bomb attacks in Zaventem and Brussels, I couldn’t but remember the article from Bloomberg Businessweek talking about pre-crime: ‘China Tries Its Hand at Pre-Crime’.  They refer us to the film Minority Report, with Tom Cruise, that takes place in a future society where three mutants foresee all Read More …

Free Search Engines, says the EU!

The European Parliament is asking to “unbundling search engines from other commercial services”, issuing a message as in the ‘Free Willy’ movie, or any other cause you may be for 🙂 The Economist has done its first page article around it: ‘Should governments break up digital monopolies?’, Nov. 29th. 2014.  Is this issue so important?  Read More …

About Internet of Things and Privacy

Innovation is creating new materials, new sensors each time smaller, cheaper, more flexible, more powerful and at the same time less power-consuming. It allows to put them everywhere: we are surrounded with devices crowded with those sensors as our phones with cameras, gyroscopes and gps. And all those measurements captured by the sensors are being Read More …

A philosophical view on hyperconnectivity

Last week I had the pleasure to hear Nicole Dewandre talk about Hyperconnectivity at the Rotary club of Waterloo.  Nicole works as advisor for societal issues for the Director General of the DG CONNECT at the European Commission. Her presentation was about the impact hyperconnectivity has on our human condition from a philosophical point of Read More …

The ‘new deal on data’ for personal data protection.

A few days ago I went to Italy, and look what caught my eyes in the airport coming back: So I cannot but get into the ‘new deal on data’ for personal data protection of Alex Pentland that I mentioned on the previous post 🙂 His idea is to treat personal data as an asset, Read More …

Alex Pentland’s article on Data-Driven Society

I recently got the new issue from Scientific American (October 2013), and in the front page was announced the article ‘The Data-Driven Society’ by Alex Pentland.  I just had to read it 🙂 He co-leads the World Economic Forum on Big Data and Personal Data initiatives.  He was talking about all the digital bread crumbs Read More …

Snowden showed us the dangers of Big Data with PRISM, are we up to the challenge to steer its use?

A television screen shows former U.S. spy agency contractor Edward Snowden during a news bulletin at a cafe at Moscow’s Sheremetyevo airport June 26, 2013. Credit: Reuters/Sergei Karpukhin   As we already discussed on my Big Data presentations,   being able to analyse the amount of data that traces all our actions and movements is a Read More …