10,000 New Yorkers. 2 Decades. A Data Trove About ‘Everything.’

Linked Data | Internet of Everything | Privacy

By MARC SANTORAJUNE 4, 2017

Paul W. Glimcher, a neuro-economist at New York University who created the Human Project, which will track thousands of New Yorkers over two decades or more. Credit Todd Heisler/The New York Times 

 

 

 

Your phone, in all likelihood, knows more about you than your doctor. Your credit card company knows your likes and dislikes better than your closest friend. Google knows your thoughts, and even completes your sentences. Your telephone service provider knows where you are at all times. Facebook, for many, knows more than the rest combined.

But Paul W. Glimcher, a neuro-economist at New York University, looks at all that data and sees a “train wreck.”

For all of Silicon Valley’s cheerleading of “big data,” Mr. Glimcher said it had yet to be used to effectively solve some of society’s most vexing problems.

So he was intrigued when Miyoung Chun, the executive vice president for science programs at the Kavli Foundation and a leader of the Obama administration’s Brain Initiative, approached him five years ago about what the future of big data might look like. Read more...