Big Data:A Revolution That Transforms How We Live, Work, and Think

How can we spot a disease 24 hours before symptoms appear? How can we predict which manholes in New York City may explode next year? Can we really identify criminals before they have committed a crime? Welcome to “big data” — the idea that we can do with a vast amount of data things that we simply couldn’t when we had less. The change in scale leads to a change in state. It upends the nature of business, how government works and the way we live, from healthcare to education. Big data will even change how we think about the world and our place in it. As we collect and crunch more data, the good news is that we can do extraordinary things: fight disease, reduce climate change, and unlock mysteries of science. The bad news is that it raises a host of worries for which society is unprepared. What does it mean if big data denies us a bank loan or considers us unfit for a surgical operation, but we can’t learn the explicit reasons because the variables that went in were so myriad and complex? How do you regulate an algorithm? Viktor Mayer-Schönberger is Professor of Internet Governance and Regulation at the Oxford Internet Institute / Oxford University. In addition to his recent international bestseller Big Data (co-authored with Kenn Cukier), Mayer-Schönberger has published eight books (including the awards-winning Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age with Princeton University Press) and is the author of over a hundred articles and book chapters on the information economy. After successes in the International Physics Olympics and the Austrian Young Programmers Contest, Mayer-Schönberger studied in Salzburg, at Harvard and at the London School of Economics. In 1986 he founded Ikarus Software, a company focusing on data security and developed the Virus Utilities, which became the best-selling Austrian software product. He was voted Top-5 Software Entrepreneur in Austria in 1991 and Person of the Year for the State of Salzburg in 2000.Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, Big Data: A Revolution That Transforms How We Live, Work, and Think, lecture, ICI Berlin, 28 April 2014 <https://doi.org/10.25620/e140428

Through Their Own Words: Towards a New Understanding of Leadership Through Metaphors

This paper suggests that metaphors are essential to understanding leadership. Metaphors can serve as underlying, organizing structures of leadership thinking and experience, and they can be mobilized in order to accomplish interpersonal goals. The literature on leadership abounds with metaphors, such as leadership as game, sport, art, or machine. The multitude of leadership metaphors used by authors and leaders alike appears determined by a complex interplay of personal, situational, and cultural factors. However, analysis of leadership interviews indicates that these metaphors center on experientially significant nuclei of meaning. By examining the entailments of leadership metaphors on such dimensions as highlighted and hidden leadership aspects, or the suggested relationship between leader and follower, metaphor analysis allows the exploration of leadership conceptualizations on an experiential level. An exploratory grid presents possible entailments of selected metaphors on important dimensions of leadership. We propose that the study of leadership metaphors can provide valuable lessons to leaders. For example, effective leadership may require a rich and situationally attuned metaphorical vocabulary. Leadership metaphors carry implicit suggestions about values—what is good, what should be done, and how—and may also allow for new insights into the ethics of leadership

Notice and Consent in a World of Big Data

Nowadays individuals are often presented with long and complex privacy notices routinely written by lawyers for lawyers, and are then requested to either ‘consent’ or abandon the use of the desired service. The over-use of notice and consent presents increasing challenges in an age of ‘Big Data’. These phenomena are receiving attention particularly in the context of the current review of the OECD Privacy Guidelines. In 2012 Microsoft sponsored an initiative designed to engage leading regulators, industry executives, public interest advocates, and academic experts in frank discussions about the role of individual control and notice and consent in data protection today, and alternative models for providing better protection for both information privacy and valuable data flows in the emerging world of Big Data and cloud computing

Après le Moment Constitutionnel : la régulation des mondes virtuels 2.0

Les mondes virtuels offrent une perspective fascinante sur les dynamiques de régulation entre juridiction en compétition. D’une manière plus générale se pose la question des effets de ces jeux sur les régulateurs du monde réel et les dizaines de millions d’utilisateurs. Cet article postule que les fournisseurs de mondes virtuels (en particuliers les dominants), devrait céder une part du contrôle (dans une certaine mesure). Ainsi les décideurs publics du monde réel se retrouveront en partie dans le choix performatifs des plates-formes monopolistiques, et ce à un niveau supérieur de régulation, mais aussi dans une certaine complexité conceptuelle.Virtual worlds offer a fascinating perspective on regulatory dynamics between competing jurisdictions. More importantly, how these dynamics play out has vast consequences for real world regulators and tens of millions of users. I suggest that virtual world providers (especially dominant ones) may want to cede control (at least to an extent), while real world policy makers will find themselves in a replay of injecting choice into platform monopolies at higher levels of not just regulatory, but also conceptual complexity

Game Programming by Demonstration

The increasing adoption of smartphones and tablets has provided tens of millions of users with substantial resources for computation, communication and sensing. The availability of these resources has a huge potential to positively transform our society and empower individuals. Unfortunately, although the number of users has increased dramatically, the number of developers is still limited by the high barrier that existing programming environments impose. To understand possible directions for helping end users to program, we present Pong Designer, an environment for developing 2D physics games through direct manipulation of object behaviors. Pong Designer is built using Scala and runs on Android tablets with the multi-touch screen as the main input. We show that Pong Designer can create simple games in a few steps. This includes (multi-player and multi-screen) Pong, Brick Breaker, Pacman, Tilting maze. We make available Pong Designer as well as several editable games that we created using it. This paper describes the main principles behind Pong Designer, and illustrates the process of developing and customizing behavior in this approach