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 …

Visualising Big Data

With all the generated electronic data, there is a new way of studying sociology.  We can measure now what’s happening in real time on a particular event.  It means a lot of computation, the new techniques to navigate on extremely large data-sets have to be used, but there is also a challenge on how to Read More …

Can we predict social behavior from Internet data?

The New York  Times posted an article from John Markoff :Government Aims to Build a ‘Data Eye in the Sky’, informing that a US Intelligence Unit launched a research program to analyse public data and find predictions of social and political relevance. Now social scientists are trying to mine the vast resources of the Internet Read More …