Big data is having an impact across every aspect of our lives, from healthcare, as scientists close in on patterns in our DNA that can predict disease, to social media, where Facebook ‘likes’ and Twitter posts are helping detect false rumours online.
We also hear from Professor Dirk Helbing, who imagines an open data Wikipedia for Europe where data about our world will be collected in a central repository which will be open to all.
Big data has given scientists – and companies – a treasure trove of new information for analysing, understanding and predicting human behaviour, but it’s also thrown up a raft of questions about privacy and ownership.
Social media is increasingly being used as a source of news, but the problem is that you can’t always trust what you read online. Now, EU researchers are tackling this issue head-on by creating software to help people decide whether they can rely on information found on Facebook or Twitter.
The falling cost of gene sequencing and the prevalence of healthcare monitoring gadgets means our bodies will become data clouds that give us an early warning for diseases like cancer and neurodegenerative conditions such as Alzheimer’s, according to researchers in a growing field known as computational medicine.
Almost 50 000 Google searches per second, 3 billion internet users, 500 million tweets per day – the data centres that underpin our information age now use 2 % of Europe's energy, researchers say. That’s the same as the energy used globally by the aviation industry.
Europe needs to pursue a different strategy from Silicon Valley if it is going to reap the social and economic benefits of big data, according to Dirk Helbing, Professor of Computational Social Science at ETH Zurich, who aims to create an open, real-time data stream from the Internet of Things.