We’ve featured lots of stories about Big Data over the last several months, but here’s a fascinating new one that illustrates the value of Big Data analytics in addressing important national priorities. Researchers at SENSEable City Lab — a new research initiative of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology — together with colleagues at GE Healthymagination have analyzed data from over 7 million electronic medical records, illustrating in a powerful visual the (sometimes surprising) relationships between medical conditions on the basis of the frequency of co-occurrences. They’re calling this extensive disease network the “Health InfoScape.” When you have heartburn, do you also feel nauseous? Or if you’re experiencing insomnia, do you tend to put on a […]

Last month at the Computing Research Association’s (CRA) biennial Snowbird Conference, a session titled “Reflections on Teaching Massive Online Open Courses” featured Peter Norvig from Google and Salman Khan (via Skype) from the Khan Academy discussing the recent transformation taking place in education. Well, yesterday, the Khan Academy launched a brand new portal that aims to teach computer science through interactive drawing. The tutorials on the new Khan website are focused on computing for today’s youth, beginning prior to high school and concluding just before a college-level introductory computer science course. Check out a video describing the new CS education portal after the jump:

Over the past year, we have blogged extensively in this space about the promise of “big data” — noting the enormous volume and heterogeneity of data, as well as the velocity of its generation, across nearly all areas of science, engineering, and society. Now, California-based enterprise storage and data management company NetApp has produced an infographic describing big data at the 2012 Summer Olympics, noting the sheer volume of data expected to be generated by social networks, connected devices, and broadcast companies throughout the world. NetApp notes “the figures are staggering,” with over 60 gigabytes of information expected to flow across British Telecom’s networks every second — the equivalent of all of Wikipedia every five seconds. Check out the impressive […]