Tag: Big Data

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Fiction Science Club

How technology can keep democracy from dying

Queen Amidala in the Galactic Senate
Queen Amidala addresses the Galactic Senate in a scene from "Star Wars." (Lucasfilm Photo)

Between the voting-machine failures, the cyberattacks and the social-media shenanigans, technology hasn’t had a great record when it comes to fostering and protecting democracy in the 21st century. But George Zarkadakis says the technology — and democracy — can be fixed.

In his new book, “Cyber Republic: Reinventing Democracy in the Age of Intelligent Machines,” the Greek-born tech expert, writer and management consultant offers a repair manual that takes advantage of innovations ranging from artificial intelligence and expert systems, to blockchain, to data trusts that are personalized and monetized.

According to Zarkadakis, one of the most important fixes will be for governments to earn back the trust of the people they govern.

“We should have a more participatory form of government, rather than the one we have now,” Zarkadakis told me from his home base in London. “A mixture, if you like, of more direct democracy and representational democracy. And that’s where this idea of citizen assemblies comes about.”

He delves into his prescription for curing liberal democracy — and the precedents that can be drawn from science fiction — in the latest episode of the Fiction Science podcast. Check out the entire show via your favorite podcast channel, whether that’s Anchor, Apple, Spotify, Google,  Breaker, Overcast, Pocket Casts or RadioPublic.

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Microsoft gives a boost to COVID-19 data analysis

Coronavirus data chart
Microsoft’s Power BI data visualization tool tracks statistics relating to the coronavirus epidemic. Click on the graphic for an interactive version. (Microsoft Graphic)

Microsoft says it’s immediately putting $20 million from its AI for Health program toward analytical tools that can help researchers and public health officials get a handle on the coronavirus pandemic.

John Kahan, Microsoft’s chief data analytics officer, said AI for Health “will collaborate with nonprofits, governments, and academic researchers on solutions, and bring our experience to the table, providing access to Microsoft AI, technical experts, data scientists and other resources.”

“We’re focusing our efforts in five specific areas where we think data, analysis and the skills of our data scientists can have the biggest impact,” Kahan wrote today in a blog post about the effort.

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Orrery.ai aims to spin data into gold

Chipsats
Chipsats like the ones shown here could provide streams of radar data for processing by Orrery.ai’s algorithms. (Photo courtesy of Orrery.ai)

Satellites, sensors, social media and purchasing data provide terabytes’ worth of information about how the global economy is working — and the insights gleaned from that data can be more precious than gold.

But what’s the best way to extract the gold from the dross? That’s where longtime space entrepreneur Dick Rocket intends to step in with a stealthy venture called Orrery.ai.

“There’s a gap between the data analysis firms and the financial sector,” Rocket told GeekWire this week. “That is our gap.”

Rocket launched Orrery.ai about a year ago, with backing from angel investors, but he and a small executive team are just now ramping up a more ambitious private funding campaign. They’re also mulling over where to put their headquarters. (The Seattle area is in the mix, along with sites in Florida, Texas, New York and Georgia.)

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Number crunchers are on the trail of dark energy

Saul Perlmutter
Berkeley astrophysicist Saul Perlmutter discusses the implications of the universe’s accelerating expansion at the University of Washington. (GeekWire Photo / Alan Boyle)

Big data just might give astronomers a better grip on the answer to one of the biggest questions in physics: Exactly what’s behind the mysterious acceleration in the expansion rate of the universe, also known as dark energy?

And that means the number crunchers at the University of Washington’s DIRAC Institute have their work cut out for them.

The role of data analysis in resolving the mystery came to the fore on May 14 during a talk given at the DIRAC Institute’s first-ever open house on the UW campus. The speaker was none other than Berkeley astrophysicist Saul Perlmutter, who won a share of the Nobel Prize in physics in 2011 for finding the first evidence of dark energy.

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How families will help shape the future of health

Future of Health panel
Panelists discuss the future of health during a Town Hall Seattle forum at the Institute for Systems Biology. From left: GeekWire’s Clare McGrane, the panel’s moderator; Leroy Hood of Providence St. Joseph Health; Howard Frumkin of the University of Washington School of Public Health; and John Aitchison of the Center for Infectious Disease Research. (GeekWire Photo / Alan Boyle)

It’s no secret that a rising flood of data, from the results of sophisticated genetic tests to the vital signs recorded by your smartphone, is transforming the way we approach health and wellness. But one of the pioneers of that trend says big data could well shift the focus of the quest for wellness from the hospital to the home.

“I think the most powerful unit for scientific wellness is the family,” Leroy Hood, co-founder of Seattle’s Institute for Systems Biology and chief science officer at Providence St. Joseph Health, said during a March 7 forum on the future of health.

The forum was hosted by the Institute for System Biology’s headquarters as part of Town Hall Seattle’s science lecture series.

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Numbers tell tales on ‘Game of Thrones’

"Game of Thrones" title

“Game of Thrones,” the HBO sword-sorcery-and-sex series that begins its seventh season tonight, has spawned a geekier kind of game: doing data analytics to study who’s on top and who’ll get the ax (figuratively and literally).

The Wall Street Journal delved deeply into the data geekery last week, noting that fans have recorded the screen time and other statistics for nearly 200 notable characters over the course of the past 60 episodes. Intricate algorithms seek to correlate the characters’ characteristics with their chances of surviving the poison pens wielded by book author George R.R. Martin and the series’ screenwriters.

Indian data scientist Shail Deliwala ran the numbers and came up with several correlations. Some mesh with common sense (for example, characters with lots of dead relatives are less likely to survive), while others mesh more with literary sense (for example, the larger the attacking force, the higher the chances that the defenders will prevail).

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Clobotics revs up drone data venture with $5M

Drone inspection
A drone inspects turbines at the Sacramento Municipal Utility District’s wind farm in California’s Solano County. (SMUD via YouTube)

Small drones, big data and computer vision: That’s the tech-frontier trifecta for Clobotics, a Shanghai startup that says it’s raised $5 million in seed funding and opened a research and development center in the Seattle area.

“This is where I took the plunge,” Clobotics co-founder George Yan, a former executive at Microsoft China and the Chinese drone venture Ehang, told GeekWire.

Yan said Clobotics (“cloud” plus “robotics”) has been more than a decade in the making. The venture aims to capitalize on the capabilities of aerial robotics and artificial intelligence to automate the task of evaluating the condition of hard-to-reach infrastructure.

GGV Capital, a U.S.-Chinese venture capital firm, is leading a $5 million financing round to get Clobotics off the ground, Yan said.

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Boeing opens hip new data lab in Vancouver

Image: Boeing airplane
Boeing’s new Vancouver lab will focus on data analytics. (Credit: Boeing Canada-AeroInfo)

A Canadian subsidiary of the Boeing Co. has announced plans to open a data analytics laboratory in downtown Vancouver, B.C., to help the aerospace giant and its customers figure out how to maximize their efficiency and minimize their costs.

The downtown lab will supplement Boeing Vancouver’s operations in suburban Richmond, where 200 software engineers and data scientists are currently employed.

“The expansion represents a natural extension of Boeing Vancouver’s analytics, software development and professional consulting work,” Boeing Vancouver President Bob Cantwell said in a news release issued today. “As one of the largest analytics groups within Boeing, we are well suited to house the new Vancouver Labs, which will focus on delivering data-driven solutions at a rapidly increased pace over traditional development.”

A spokesman for the company, Mike Pound, told GeekWire that 50 data analysts would be working at the downtown location, which is in a converted warehouse on Homer Street in the Yaletown district. Moving day is due to take place next month.

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What mobile phone data can reveal about you

Image: Rwandans with phones
The mobile phone penetration rate in Rwanda is more than 70 percent. (Credit: Joshua Blumenstock)

Researchers have analyzed data about mobile phone use in Rwanda to figure out how wealthy a phone’s user is – and they say they might be able to do the same kind of analysis for any other country.

The study, published today in the journal Science, applies big-data models to look at much more than income. The Rwandan data, for example, could be massaged to predict which phone users owned a motorcycle or a TV.

Joshua Blumenstock, the study’s lead author and an information scientist at the University of Washington, is now working on a follow-up project to see how easily the computer models can be applied to places beyond Rwanda.

“In every country, we hypothesize that there’s a relationship between how people use their phone and how wealthy they are,” he said in a Science podcast. “The exact nature of that relationship is going to change from one country to another, and it might even change from one year to the next within a country. But fundamentally, you’d think that there are these relationships that exist.”

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