Featured Research Videos
The Cape Makes the Superhero
Big Data Requires Big Visions for Big Change
While this seems to be an omnipresent conclusion nowadays, it will certainly not be the case. Data are based on what happened in the past, which restricts our forecasting ability to futures similar to the past. But aim at creating futures distinct from the past: hopefully a "better world." Making predictions about changing futures requires more than data; it requires theory-driven models that envision futures that do not exist in data.
Mankind From Space is an Epic Journey of Discovery
Within this transformation, changes in the global communication landscape have been essential. Martin Hilbert contributed to elaboration of the following visualizations and analogies that reveal how we've transformed our planet and produced an interconnected world of extraordinary complexity.
The Virtual Self
Jorge Peña delivered this talk on April 24, 2015, at the Institute for Social Sciences conference series "Leading Research in the Social Sciences Today."
The Theory, Practice and Limits of Big Data for the Social Sciences
This talk presents some of Martin Hilbert's recent results about the theoretical framework of how to think about data-driven growth, as well as several instructive real-world examples of big data use (some of them funny, others rather scary). In the presentation, he also discusses the limitations of big data in explaining the social sciences.
Making it Count
Keynote speaker Martin Hilbert discusses opportunities, threats and policy challenges linked to the ongoing data revolution.
World Info Capacity Animation
This animation, produced in cooperation with The Economist, presents several intuitive analogies that explain the growth of the world's technological capacity to store, communicate and compute information.