Regensburg 2013 – scientific programme

Parts | Days | Selection | Search | Updates | Downloads | Help

SOE: Fachverband Physik sozio-ökonomischer Systeme

SOE 22: Focus Session: Big Data (joint with jDPG)

SOE 22.1: Topical Talk

Thursday, March 14, 2013, 09:30–10:00, H37

Physics and the Information Society: Turning Big Data into Big Insight — •René Pfitzner — ETH Zurich, Chair of Systems Design, Switzerland

As of today 2.3 Billion people are online, spend 1 Billion hours on the web, write 400 Mio. tweets and produce a total of 65 terabytes of Facebook content – every day.
Inspired by these impressive numbers, in this talk I will illustrate two main points about “Big Data” research. First, based on examples I will show how the availability of large amounts of “online” data facilitates research to gain insights into “offline” phenomena like disease spreading. Second, I will show that in complex information systems, composed of interacting social and technical components, non-trivial questions about information propagation, the emergence of memes or measuring the relevance of content occur.
I will point to methodologies that have been developed, and continue to be developed, to cope with these research challenges and opportunities - often inspired by theories well known from the Physics literature.