Former SFI Omidyar Fellow Nathan Eagle explains how the data trails we generate in our everyday activities can be “mined” to improve society.
In his Q&A with The Guardian, Eagle offers insights from his new book “Reality Mining: Using Big Data to Engineer a Better World.” Its premise— people around the world create massive amounts of data through everyday web browsing, commuting, mobile phone use, and credit card transactions. For emerging markets and under-served regions, Eagle argues that all that data should be used to inform infrastructure development, and to fuel projects that improve the human condition at both the global and community levels.
“Data is an asset that should go back to the community, an asset that can and should be leveraged,” he says. “Data is in fact one of the few assets that some of these folks have. And in a lot of these regions, that data could be re-purposed to create real change.”
Read a Q&A with Eagle in The Guardian (October 16, 2014)
Check out Eagle's book, published by The MIT Press