thehumansarecoming

This months issue of Wired Magazine is running a great series of articles about the Petabyte Age.

Sensors everywhere. Infinite storage. Clouds of processors. Our ability to capture, warehouse, and understand massive amounts of data is changing science, medicine, business, and technology. As our collection of facts and figures grows, so will the opportunity to find answers to fundamental questions. Because in the era of big data, more isn’t just more. More is different.

The article entitled The End of Theory shows just how significant dawning of this new Age could possibly be. It argues that the current model of science, hypothesize, model, test — is becoming obsolete by the availability of massive data sets and our increasing ability to analyze them. The reason for this it argues, lies in George Box’s maxim “All models are wrong, but some are useful.” The scientific models we have can only ever be approximation of the real world and will never reflect absolute reality. But enter the Petabyte age and we can now throw data into the biggest computing clusters the world has ever seen and let statistical algorithms find patterns where science cannot. The implications are far reaching!

One area this will have dramatic impact is Location Awareness. In my previous post, I quoted something I grabbed off the GeoWankers list. One point in particular stands out as one that will benifit significantly from this Petabyte Age

To be able to see. Super rich socially filtered static spatial data about any area of interest. To know where your friends are, where stuff is, the history of things. I call this “the old white mans internet”. It is an internet of dry dead things; Wikipedia entries and Encyclopedia Of Life and WiserEarth and all the other fact repositories…

The amount of data accessable on the internet is growing exponetially and a significant proportion of that growth has come from the so called social software sites, e.g. myspace, facebook, youtube, flickr, twitter, etc. All of this data has been put to use in some very creative ways. Astronout, a flickr-generated music video, and We Feel Fine (and Twistori the twitter version) are particularly interesting examples of whats possible.

It’s once you start being adding geographic data into that already heady mix that things starting becoming really interesting. With sites like GroupsNearYou and Twitter Vision shining a lights on moments, thoughts and happenings around the corner and the world.

But, these pale into comparison to CitySense.

Citysense is an innovative mobile application for local nightlife discovery and social navigation, answering the question, “Where is everybody?”

Citysense shows the overall activity level of the city, top activity hotspots, and places with unexpectedly high activity, all in real-time. Then it links to Yelp and Google to show what venues are operating at those locations. Citysense is a free demonstration of the Macrosense platform that everyone can enjoy.

Macrosense is in turn…

At the heart of Macrosense are powerful machine learning algorithms that process time-stamped location data and metadata streams from heterogeneous sources – GPS, WiFi positioning, cell tower triangulation, RFID and other sensors – and empower companies and investors to better understand and predict human behavior on a macro scale.

Admittedly, CitySense does seem limit in scope but as a mere demonstration of Macrosense, it is mighty impressive. It is also probably one of the first mainstream applications to emerge from Reality Mining project at MIT’s Media Lab.

Of course, the Petabyte Age implications for Location Awareness are still a long way from being truely realised. Geographic data is stil limited but thats all due to change.Location bases services are springing up thick and fast, and consumer devices are becomng more and more capable.

My Nokia N95 has builtin GPS, WIFI, Bluetooth, etc. which is an impressive array of features but unfortunately applications to leverage them are still lacking. But, the new iPhone now has a similar feature set, and that will most definately be complimented with applications to take full advantage of the hardware.

Nokia have also made some interesting announcements in recent weeks. First the acquisition of mapping data provider NAVTEQ, its intention to acquire Location Based Services web app Plazes and most recently their intentions to buy Symbian and open source it. Some believe the Symbian announcement is a response to Googles Andriod, which is another major development of its own.

Wow, so this has turned into quiet a mouthfull! So hey, lets see what happens, once that data becomes readily available I think we’ll be in for some interesting Petabyte Age times!