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The Big Idea Behind Big Data Posted on : Nov 18 - 2017

In the Spring of 2009, the H1N1/09 virus — dubbed "swine flu" — made the jump from pigs to people and began claiming its first victims.

Fearing the beginning of a global swine flu pandemic, terrified health officials began planning for the worst. Shutting down the world's major airports became the nuclear option of their arsenal — the last hope for halting the virus from reaching unstoppable thresholds of contagion.

That, though, was before two Italian scientists demonstrated that shuttering the air-transport system could delay the dreaded epidemic threshold by, at most, a few weeks (while also leading to economic chaos).

The researchers providing this crucial insight were not doctors but physicists. More importantly, the math they deployed was the same as that used daily by researchers at "Big Data" giants like Facebook, Google — and the NSA. It was also the same math used by scientists around the world studying the human genome, the efficiencies of green power grids, the economics of world trade and a hundred other applications. It was the math of a new kind of science whose promise had to be weighed against the darker side of Big Data, with all its implications for surveillance and control.

It's a science called Network Theory.

For more than 400 years, science has transformed the world again and again by discovering new additions to its census of "things." The discoveries of microscopic germs, of electromagnetic fields, of genes, and of quarks each introduced us to new, previously unimagined players on the cosmic stage.

As we find our way in a world shaped by Big Data, it's not the reams of information we gather, but the networks they illuminate that are the newest addition to science's index of things. That is what makes networks the big idea behind Big Data.

But what are networks and how do they fit into our data-driven culture? A network is just an entity where the connections between parts matters more than the parts themselves. We all have intimate experience with networks in the web of personal relations expanding from you to your friends to their friends and so on — the social network Facebook made so explicit. But the genes on which life depends also form a network where the expression of one gene depends on the activity of others. Inter-linked food chains in ecology are networks of multiple predators feeding on multiple layers of prey. The chain of world commerce is also a network where trade represents connections between businesses and nations. View More