I wish policy makers and funders of research would visit this site which rightly, in my view, attempts to move us collectively beyond the current preoccupation with 'big data'.
Here is the associated press release:
CAMBRIDGE (Dec 17) — One question Big Data can’t answer: how do we know what’s important in a complex world?
Big Data keeps getting bigger, whether in biology, medicine, social
sciences or social media. But how do we know which pieces matter in
continually
larger piles of data? The trick is to recognize patterns in the largest
scale of behavior. These patterns, determined by relative handful of
information,
are not only the key to understanding a system, but they also tell us
how we can influence its behavior going forward.
In an article released today, complex systems scientist Yaneer
Bar-Yam, president of the New England Complex Systems Institute,
explains how his team has
been successful using this approach to predict and explain market
crashes, food prices, the Arab Spring, ethnic violence, and other
complex biological and
social systems.
Rather than amass larger and larger data sets, determining which
information is pivotal (and ignoring the rest) is the key to solving the
world’s
increasingly complex challenges.
The article, titled “Beyond big data: Identifying important
information for real world challenges” describes a general way to
understand complex systems.
“Big data analytics is a buzzword today,” Bar-Yam explains, “but the
key to using any data is understanding its significance, and this
requires knowing
the patterns in the data and how we can affect or change the system’s
behavior. This requires key ideas about the way the system functions.”
Complexity first made its mark in physics by demonstrating how
traditional approaches of statistics and calculus fail to describe such
radical
transitions as the moment water boils into vapor. These transitions
required a new kind of mathematics. Bar-Yam and his group have been
applying generalized
versions of the new mathematics to answering real world problems.
“Understanding the problems we face in the world today requires more
than just data, it requires insight into radical changes that will take
place in the
future,” Bar-Yam stated. “We have to understand transitions that might
happen in the behavior of systems, not just how they were behaving
yesterday.”
I would argue that investing in Systems Thinking in Practice is needed to focus on the end of the graph where what is important needs to be understood and acted upon.
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