Data as a Lens: Enhancing Our Understanding of the World
Simon Hefti
Creating value from data. Co-Founder of D ONE and herlock.ai. Physicist, Data Scientist, Lecturer and Bassist.
You have heard it many times: data's value is touted. But where is that value actually coming from?
The data’s worth lies in its ability to enhance our understanding of the world. Consider fever measurement: the temperature check tells you how your illness progresses. Similarly, as an entrepreneur you probably monitor daily sales to gauge financial health. In both cases, important facets of a complex system (like your body, or your company) are expressed with data [1].
This approach, using data to decipher the world, is rooted in science. Galileo's discovery of Earth's orbit around the Sun, John Snow's identification of a cholera-infected well in London, and the revelation of DNA's double-helix structure all exemplify this method.
No wonder everyone wants to adopt this successful technique. This is how business intelligence came along, then customer analytics, and now data science and machine learning.
Of course, the key to unlocking data's value is … data. This is where digitisation comes in. Today's data entry tools, smartphone cameras, and machine sensors all provide an abundance of data. Many applications, from trend forecasting, production optimisation, fraud detection, and personalised healthcare do demonstrate the power of data driven value creation.
But what about text and images? They contain information, too. As an example, the doctor might say your blood pressure is 120/80. Or a document might say: Person A, born January 1 2000, living at Main Street 1. Text and images are just another way of representing data. The trick is to be able to get at this data. Humans can do this easily. New machine learning systems in the realm of natural language processing and computer vision can do it increasingly well, too (for more on NLP, also see [2]).
In other words: data is providing us additional ways to see and understand the world we live in. Using this tool to navigate successfully: that’s what we call data driven value creation.
[1] Body Temperature, Pulse Rate, Respiration Rate, Blood Pressure are called vital signs in medicine for a reason