In a piece for The Wall Street Journal about business schools starting business analytics programs, Lindsay Gellman highlights one of MIT’s new offerings. “Professors and administrators at its Sloan School of Management are developing a tentatively titled Masters in Analytics program to be offered jointly with the university’s Operations Research Center beginning in 2016,” Gellman writes.
Cesar Hidalgo of the MIT Media Lab spoke at the Wired 2014 conference about the Observatory of Economic Complexity, a tool that produces a visual narrative about countrie and the products they exchange, writes Katie Collins for Wired. "We can work out what products our economies are going to start making and stop making,” says Hidalgo.
Tom Fox-Brewster writes for The Guardian about how researchers are using big data to revolutionize sports. Fox-Brewster writes that MIT Professor Cynthia Rudin believes “Big Data analytics can help in various ways, from tweaking training plans to determining patterns about competitors.”
Madhumita Venkataramanan of Wired writes that MIT researchers have found that Google Glass can be used to detect pulse and respiration rates in real time. "The data from Google Glass is so much richer than a dedicated heart-rate sensor, because people use it in their regular lives," says PhD student Javier Hernandez.
New Scientist reporter Hal Hodson writes about how MIT Media Lab researchers have programmed Google Glass to measure vital signs in an effort to give users a look at their emotional state. "It's always been a challenge to have a computer understand something about your stress but not make it worse in the moment," says Prof. Rosalind Picard.
Chris Michael writes for The Guardian about new work conducted as part of the MIT Social Computing Group’s “You Are Here” project that mapped rat sightings in four U.S. cities. The team used data from public service calls to create time-lapse maps of rats in New York, Boston, Washington, and Chicago.
Boston Globe reporter Scott Kirsner writes about David Rose’s new book “Enchanted Objects: Design, Human Desire and the Internet of Things” and his vision for the future. Rose believes that as the cost of building smart devices drops, there will be an increase in their production and application to all sorts of objects.
Boston Globe reporter Michael Farrell writes about Smart Scheduling Inc., an MIT startup formed during a health care hackathon at MIT in 2012. The company aims to use data science to predict which patients are the most and least likely to show up for an appointment.
Kate Tuttle of The Boston Globe reviews “Enchanted Objects: Design, Human Desire, and the Internet of Things,” by David Rose of the MIT Media Lab. The book focuses on how we will interact with technology in the future. “As inventors we should take a lesson from the magicians of the world,” says Rose.
Katie Collins writes for Wired that MIT researchers have developed a system that allows people to choose exactly what information they share online. “The primary benefit of this is that you as an individual would not be able to be identified from an anonymised dataset,” writes Collins.
New Scientist reporter Hal Hodson writes about a new algorithm called StreetScore that creates a perceived safety map of a city based off of crowdsourced data. “The idea is not to create no-go areas, but to locate areas of inequality,” Hodson explains.
The Economist spotlights increasing concerns about how private consumer data is accessed and employed, highlighting the recent White House big data privacy conference hosted at MIT and Professor Vinod Vaikuntanathan’s work with homomorphic encryption.
John Naughton includes research by Professors Eric Brynjolfsson and Sandy Pentland for this Guardian article on Big Data. Both Brynjolfsson and Pentland acknowledge that Big Data analytics provide a great deal of information about individuals and organizations.
Joshua Rothman writes for The New Yorker about Professor Alex "Sandy" Pentland’s book, Social Physics. “In fact, part of what makes the book so interesting is that Pentland has figured out how to capture, in numerical form, the intimate social vibrations of office life,” writes Rothman.
Randy Bean of The Wall Street Journal interviews Professor Alex “Sandy” Pentland on the transformational power of big data. “Scientists are discovering that we can begin to explain many things—financial crashes, revolutions, panics—that previously appeared to be random events,” says Pentland.