Macro Connections

Abstract

The rise of computational methods has generated a new natural resource.
That new natural resource is data. While it is not clear if Big Data
will open up trillion dollar markets, what it is clear is that making
sense of visualizations are essential meaning out of. The capacity to
create data visualizations, however, is not widespread. To help develop
this capacity I have been working on the creation of Data Vizualization
Engines, which are tools that allow people quickly visualize any portion
of a large dataset and construct visual narratives from which they can
draw insight. In this talk I will present five big data visualization
engines we created at the MIT Media Lab’s Macro Connections group and
will show how to use them to improve our understanding of the
development of economies, cultures and cities. The data visualization
engines I will demo include (i) the Observatory of Economic Complexity
(atlas.media.mit.edu), which is the most comprehensive tool for
exploring international trade data to date; (ii) DataViva
(dataviva.info), which is a tool we created to open up data for the
entire formal sector economy of Brazil, including data on all of the
working force, municipalities, industries, and occupations of Brazil;
(iii) Pantheon (pantheon.media.mit.edu), a dataset and visualization
engine we created to explore global patterns of cultural production;
(iv) Immersion (immersion.media.mit.edu), a tool that inverts the email
interface, by focusing it on people rather than messages; and (v) Place
Pulse and StreetScore (pulse.media.mit.edu streetscore.media.mit.edu),
which are crowd-sourcing and machine learning tools we have developed to
help understand the aesthetic aspects of cities and their evolution.

Posted on Dec 17, 2014 in Discrete Mathematics, Seminars