So data and analytics are dramatically changing our everyday lives. Not just online, not just in some distant future, but in the physical world, and in very real and tangible ways.
I spent the past 11 years of my life as a geek at MIT, working in big data labs that seek to use data science to study the physical world and try to solve society's great problems. The field of big data seeks to analyze massive pools of data using computational tools to find patterns and trends.
Data can be a really extraordinary storyteller, unveiling the hidden narratives of things in our everyday lives that we never would have seen. I find the personal stories of inanimate things brought to life to be extraordinarily compelling.
I want to highlight, first, two projects from my time at MIT that I think highlight this phenomenon really well. The first is called Trash Track, and in this project, we sought to better understand the waste-management system, to answer the question "Where does your trash go when you throw it away?"
Your old coffee cup or that flip phone that you carried around in the early 2000s, or a bagel or this morning's paper — where do these things go? This data didn't exist, so we had to create it.
We answered and then visualized this question by installing small sensors into pieces of trash and then throwing them into the waste system. And what you're seeing here is the data.
Every line, every node that you see is a single piece of trash moving through the city of Seattle, and then across the state, and then across the country, as weeks and months go by. And it's important to visualize this data, because none of you are, probably, sitting here thinking, "Yeah, that looks right."
"That's working like it should, right?" Because, no —
What the data shows us is a highly inefficient system whose inherent brokenness I don't think we really would have seen had the sensors not done the journalism for us. A second project that I'd have to highlight has to do with creating robots that dive into sewers and sample wastewater.
I know that sewage kind of gets a bad rap, but it's actually kind of awesome, because it can tell us an incredible amount about the health of our communities. This technology was spun out by a group call Biobot Analytics, who's creating a cutting-edge technology to turn our sewers into modern-day health observatories.
