Preparing for the Data Deluge

​This year’s Jules Verne Corner will ask futurists to forecast the future of data, exploring the new frontiers becoming within reach thanks to advances in data collection and analysis. The quantity of data is soaring unimaginably wherever you look, and the growth rate is accelerating all the time. Data – big data – is the new frontier and getting as important as capital and labour. Our increasing ability to capture and draw useful information from large volumes of data opens up a wealth of new possibilities but also poses challenges and risks.

How do we collect and store data? Is there enough energy available to do all the data crunching? How can we discover data?  How can we analyze data? How can we combine data sets? How do we make sense of data? How do we display and visualize data?

Data are stolen and misused on a regular basis. Privacy breaches, identity theft and fraud are omnipresent. What are the safeguards that we can put in place to prevent malevolent uses of data? What sort of mechanisms will allow us to trust that data will be used for the purposes expressed by data custodians? What social forces and movements would emerge in reaction to global multinational companies and global governmental forces use of data to pursuit commercial objectives and political control? Who owns the data? How can individuals be in control of data? Should there be an expiry date on data? Which data should be put in the public domain? What should be the rules on the use of data?

What are the barriers to be overcome to achieve the full potential of Big Data and associated analytics techniques?

• How can we trust the integrity, accuracy and quality of data? How can databases be best kept up-to-date? With algorithms doing the thinking, how would we know if they go wrong?
• What implications will the rise of Big Data have for the principles underlying the Web?
• There is great diversity in the existing data environment. Industries are working independently, creating data silos that may impede our ability to make full use of the world’s data. How can data best be organized (metadata)? Can we introduce interoperability to improve our navigation of data? Are new standards or data formats or protocols needed?
• What are the new ways of thinking about data to get from information to knowledge and from knowledge to wisdom?

Speakers:

Prof. Jun Kyun Choi, Korea's Advanced Institute of Science and Technology
Prof. Mahmoud Daneshmand, Stevens Institute of Technology, USA