Data Science and Computational Thinking [inc Big Data and Internet of Things]

Among the key findings:

Four of today’s top 10 incumbents (in terms of market share) in each industry will be displaced by digital disruption in the next five years. The threat extends not only to displacement of big companies, but also to the very existence of entire industries.
Despite that, digital disruption has not received board-level attention in about 45 percent of companies (on average across industries). In addition, 43 percent of companies either do not acknowledge the risk of digital disruption, or have not addressed it sufficiently. Nearly a third are taking a “wait and see” approach. Only 25 percent describe their response to digital disruption as proactive.
The industry that will experience the most digital disruption between now and 2020 is technology products and services. Pharmaceuticals, meanwhile, is likely to experience the least amount of digital disruption. However, the clock is ticking, and the vortex is swirling: across all industries, the average time to disruption is just 3.1 years.

Level Up Your Data Storytelling Game

Let’s follow Crowley the Crocodile as he goes about his day in the year 2030, from the moment his bitcoin-powered bioalarm clock wakes him, until he eats his late night pizza ordered using a rating service that runs without human owners.

The final Code Acts in Education seminar takes place on 1st October 2015 at the University of Bristol. Registration is open for the event; it is free, and funding is available to help support travel, but places are limited. To mark the event, we have produced a free, open access e-book of papers from the…

Eric Fischer, a data artist from Oakland California, has taken geotagging information from Flickr to map where tourists and locals take photos not only in Sydney but in some of the most visited cities in the world.

A self-confessed "map geek", Fischer spoke to CityLab about what inspires him to dig away at this data to make fascinating maps of cities: "Ultimately, almost everything I have been making tries to take the dim, distant glimpse of the real world that we can see through data and magnify some aspect of it in an attempt to understand something about the structure of cities," he said.

"I don't know if that comes through at all in the actual products, but it is what they are all building toward."


Eric Fischer, data artist.
He has also been using Twitter data to create tweet maps. The quantity of data is staggering. 

In 2014 he said: "There are about 10 million public geotagged tweets every day, which is about 120 per second, up from about three million a day when I first started watching.

"The accumulated history adds up to nearly three terabytes of compressed JSON [a data format] and is growing by four gigabytes a day."

When it’s possible to record the exact movements of players in team games such as football, basketball, and so on, how can algorithms crunch this data to provide meaningful insight?

Using online profile and movements, government aims to catch "terrorists" in advance.

In a world where 74 million young people are currently unemployed, NFTE believes exposure to their project-based learning program makes youth more career-ready and prepared for employment by high-skill industries and by cutting edge companies like SAP. Currid says thousands of new businesses have grown out of the students’ participation in the NFTE program. 

Companies like SAP collaborate to provide new solutions for big business and emerging leaders in healthcare and sports. Since their native language is digital, it seems apparent that we are wise to give a listening ear to young entrepreneurs thinking outside the big-data box for solutions of the future.

If big data is accessible to these enterprising teens, there’s no longer any excuse for small business owners the world over not to use this resource for their own advances. With inexpensive online tools, you can integrate your consumer data with massive collections of information about your target market, general mobile usage, specialized industry data and so much more.

I recently gave a talk at the American Association for the Advancement of Science about Big Data and Analytics and why it matters for development.

Most companies are swimming in more data than they know what to do with. Unfortunately, too many of them associate that drowning phenomenon with big data itself. Technologically, big data is a very specific thing--the marriage of structured data (your company's proprietary information) with unstructured data (public sources such as social media streams and government feeds).

When you overlay unstructured data on top of structured data and use analytics software to visualize it, you can get insights that were never possible before--predict product sales, better target customers, discover new markets, etc.

Big data is no longer suffering from the lack of tools that plagued it just a few years ago, when doing big data meant having data scientists on staff and messing with open source tools like R and Hadoop.

“Big data” is a pernicious buzz word of our age, responsible for scores of hastily assembled PowerPoints in board rooms and classrooms throughout the world. That haste reveals shallowness of thought, an over-reliance on supposedly empirical and objective “data” to elucidate the mysteries of human existence. That such an expectation is impossible is not lost on humanists, which I still fancy myself to be despite a career spent in health sciences libraries.

That career has placed me within computationally intensive academic health care enterprises. My employers have sought to mine patient care notes and health profiles to improve the delivery of care across a system as well as individual patient outcomes. These efforts are big data without the marketing spin, and as such they have earned my support. They represent an intelligent application of data mining tools, in order to address real-world challenges. Although “big data” as an intellectual construct is fatuous, data mining as a practical skill is valuable.

Blurring the boundaries between art and technology, we set out on a challenge to see if the great Master can be brought back to life to create a new painting https://www.nextrembrandt.com

The Next Rembrandt is a collaboration between:
ING / Microsoft / TU Delft / Mauritshuis / Rembrandthuis

With more than 10 million users, the Scratch online community is the largest online community where kids learn to program. Since it was created, a central goal of the community has been to promote “remixing” — the reworking and recombination of existing creative artifacts. As the video below shows, remixing programming projects in the current web-based version of Scratch is as easy is as clicking on the “see inside” button in a project web-page, and then clicking on the “remix” button in the web-based code editor. Today, close to 30% of projects on Scratch are remixes.

The smart rubbish bin is almost an Internet of Things cliché, but the job of keeping rubbish bins empty is anything but trivial. Just ask Peter Wilkes, chief operating officer of Corio Waste Management.

The Internet of Things is feeding us countless new streams of data to quantify and analyze things in ways that were never before possible. It's also creating serious new security risks in the process. We examine the possibilities and the dangers.

Saturday morning in Silicon Valley dozens and dozens of students settled in to come up with apps to help two organizations serving the poorest people. Santa Clara University's Association for Computing Machinery chapter held its third annual hackathon, "Hack for Humanity." In a hackathon, competitors are allotted a specific amount of time to build a project that fits a given theme.

The 24-hour event brought together participants from area colleges studying not just computer science or engineering but also business, biotech, communications and graphic design. Students worked individually or in teams of four to develop applications for either of two recipients.