SFI Research Fellow Simon DeDeo leads an article in Wired magazine on the challenges of analyzing large noisy, unstructured, dynamic datasets such as those that chronicle human affairs.
“'In physics, you typically have one kind of data and you know the system really well,' said DeDeo. 'Now we have this new multimodal data [gleaned] from biological systems and human social systems, and the data is gathered before we even have a hypothesis.' The data is there in all its messy, multi-dimensional glory, waiting to be queried, but how does one know which questions to ask when the scientific method has been turned on its head?" writes Wired's Jennifer Ouellette.
"DeDeo is not the only researcher grappling with these challenges. Across every discipline, data sets are getting bigger and more complex, whether one is dealing with medical records, genomic sequencing, neural networks in the brain, astrophysics, historical archives, or social networks," she writes.
Read the article in Wired (October 9, 2013)
The article was originally published in Quanta magazine.
Read the article in Quanta (October 4, 2013)
Read the commentary about the article in National Review Online (October 10, 2013)
Hear DeDeo and Ouelette discuss the research on the podcast Virtually Speaking Science (October 11, 2013)
Read the mention of DeDeo's work in Ouelette's Scientific American blog (October 12, 2013)