This August at the Bellagio Center, The Rockefeller Foundation and PopTech are bringing together a group of select Fellows to participate in the inaugural offering of a unique collaborative incubator focused on topics relevant to the lives of poor and vulnerable populations. The Bellagio/PopTech Fellows program will also serve as a laboratory for the study of the nature of collaboration itself as a profound tool for creative problem-solving and solution development.
We are pleased to announce the first class of Bellagio/PopTech Fellows, who will focus on how data science and technology can contribute to the creation of more resilient communities.
An ever-expanding human footprint has precipitated increasing challenges in public health, climate adaptation, social policy, ecology, resource planning and urbanization. This is also a moment of breathtaking expansion of new data sources and insights that might improve our resilience in the face of those threats, unleashing new potential to design systems that persist, recover or even thrive amid disruption. Large, complex data sets, collectively referred to as big data, are at the fore of this trend.
Big data’s potential is certainly real: Researchers at IBM suggest that advances in IT have been so dramatic that we now produce 2.5 quintillion bytes of data every day; an astounding 90 percent of all of the data in existence was created in the last two years alone.
“Big data’s promise hinges on questions about the production, ownership, openness, veracity, social life and limits of big data.”
But the reality of harnessing data’s power is much more nuanced. Data literacy generally lags far behind the ability to produce it. Big data’s promise hinges on questions about the production, ownership, openness, veracity, social life and limits of big data. In such an environment, how do we avoid making poor inferences or drowning in information overload? How do we socialize the right mindsets and behaviors?
The 2013 Bellagio/PopTech Fellows, made up of key innovators in the fields of data and computer science, the arts, and the humanitarian and ecological spheres, will explore these questions and begin the path to practical answers. Our goal is to bring new ideas and opportunities to bear on the practical intersection of these two major themes of the day: big data and resilience.
The Fellows will meet for two weeks in late August, and benefit from visits by several “catalysts” to further spur their thinking. We hope that this gathering of eclectic minds will result in unconventional breakthroughs.
Leave a comment