Many sciences have been transformed as they've moved from being data-scarce to data-rich, including the earth sciences, biology, astronomy, medicine, and, increasingly, the social sciences.
Think of the human genome, hundreds of billions of observable stars — or billions of Twitter tweets.
Exploring this theme, the University of Vermont’s Complex Systems Center will be hosting a TEDxUVM Event, “Big Data, Big Stories,” Friday, Oct. 28, from 2 to 5 p.m.
Registration for this event is now closed, but the talks will be live-streaming on the Complex System Center website: http://www.uvm.edu/~cmplxsys/. All talks will be archived on the site too.
“We’ll be hearing from speakers who are discovering the stories that emerge from the rapidly accelerating global explosion of data," says UVM mathematician Peter Dodds, director of UVM’s Complex Systems Center, “many of these are new kinds of stories and profoundly surprising."
These speakers include:
Hilary Mason: chief scientist, bit.ly, Click This, Share That: Learning about the World in Realtime
Austin Troy, UVM, Seeing the Pattern for the Pixels: Extracting Meaning from Massive Spatial Data Sets
Mike Schmidt, Cornell, The Robotic Scientist: Mining Experimental Data for Laws of Nature and Accelerating Discovery with Eureqa
Gary Johnson, UVM, Modelling Ecosystem Services under Uncertainty with ARIES
Hugh Garavan, UVM, Addiction, the Frontal Lobes, and the Science of Willpower
Rob Axtell, George Mason University and the Santa Fe Institute, Modeling the Economy with 150 Million Agents
Joshua Bongard, UVM, The Robot Revolution
Marta González, MIT, Mobile Data for Urban Transformation
Isabel Kloumann, former UVM student, Measuring Happiness the Big Data Way: In Language and Online
Neil Johnson, University of Miami, Beyond Black Swans: From Irregular Warfare to Subsecond Financial Crises
For more information about the event, speakers, and live-streaming, please visit TEDxUVM at http://www.uvm.edu/~tedxuvm
What is TEDx?
In the spirit of ideas worth spreading, the non-profit organization TED has created a program called TEDx. TEDx is a program of local, self-organized events that bring people together to share a TED-like experience. Our event is called TEDxUVM, where x = independently organized TED event.
At the TEDxUVM event, TEDTalks video and live speakers will combine to spark deep discussion and connection in a small group. The TED Conference provides general guidance for the TEDx program, but individual TEDx events, including this one at UVM, are self-organized.
This independent TEDx event is operated under license from TED.
Last year, UVM hosted its first TEDx event on “leading for sustainability.”
About TED
TED is a nonprofit organization devoted to Ideas Worth Spreading. Started as a four-day conference in California 26 years ago, TED has grown to support those world-changing ideas with multiple initiatives. At TED, the world's leading thinkers and doers are asked to give the talk of their lives in 18 minutes. Talks are then made available, free, at TED.com.
TED speakers have included Bill Gates, Jane Goodall, Elizabeth Gilbert, Sir Richard Branson, Benoit Mandelbrot, Philippe Starck, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, Isabel Allende and former UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown.
Two major TED events are held each year: The TED Conference takes place every spring in Long Beach, California (along with a parallel conference, TEDActive, in Palm Springs), and TEDGlobal is held each summer in Edinburgh, Scotland. For information visit http://www.ted.com/