Hi everyone,

I’m Marge Breya the EVP and chief marketing officer at Informatica and I couldn’t be more delighted to have talked with Rick Smolan about big data and the implications and benefits it can have on the human race. Rick as many of you know is the creator of the human face of big data project and he is going to be one of the featured speakers at Informatica World 2013. Follow this three part series to read the entire transcript of our conversation.

————————-

MB: Hi Rick welcome to the podcast.

RS: Pleased to be here, thank you.

MB: We have a few minutes of your time and we thought we wouldd just focus on a couple key points that you may be covering and our audience might be interested in in terms of big data.  Let’s start at the beginning. What brought your interest to big data?

RS: I’ve been working on projects for many years with groups of journalists and every 18 months I gather the tribe to do a deep dive on emerging topics such as the Internet. The first year it was touching people’s lives. Another project focused on the global water crisis.  Another on the effect of the microprocessor in the course if a typical day. Last year I was at the TED conference and I ran into Marissa Mayer who was still at Google and is now CEO of Yahoo and she asked me what my next project was. I told her I was struggling with what interesting emerging topics we should focus on and she said you guys should look at big data.

I asked her to explain that phase and her analogy piqued my interest.  She said big data was like watching the planet grow a nervous system. She explained that through our smart phones, our Google searches, credit card and ATM  transactions, for the first time the industry the human race has the ability to collect that data analyze it and visualize it and respond to it while things are still happening, almost in real-time.

MB: As you began to get started and look into this I’m sure you realized it was more than what you originally thought, for example from everything that’s happening with our citizens to what’s happening in terms of sensors on cars, machines, etc.  Any big observations that you came to?

RS: We had almost two hundred people working on the Human Face of Big Data. And as I talked to people so much of what I’m sharing reminded me of what I recall hearing in the early days of the Internet in 1993. People were talking about cyberspace and the World Wide Web. People like Nicholas Negroponte were waxing eloquent that the Internet was going to change every aspect of life on earth and other people were saying that it’s just a better way to look at pornography. In many respects Nicholas Negroponte was prophetic in terms of his envisioning of how this technology connecting people was never possible before was going to really alter life on earth.

When I started looking at big data, I was hearing people on the one side saying big data equals Big Brother, just another way to oppress people,  to track them  and sell them stuff they don’t want. And then on the other hand I spoke with Marissa who saw this as a great benefit to humanity.

Now that I’ve spent a year and a half working with this wonderful team of journalists, writers, photographers, illustrators and researchers I’m much more on the glass half empty side. I think there’s certainly lots of things that we have to be careful of like privacy in these oceans of data, but I think the up side offers so much to our species. I deeply believe that big data is going to have 1,000 times more impact than the Internet on our lives. You can see it happening in every aspect of human behavior. Right now we’re in the caveman era of big data and I don’t think it’s going to be called big data for much longer. I think it’s going to be segmented and fragmented and called something else. I think we’re starting to get glimpses of how it’s starting to change our way of responding to how we use our resources much more wisely. My kids are 10 and 13 and my mother just turned 90 and I want to know how all this is going to affect their lives.

MB: This is fascinating, so as you think about Informatica World, this year will have nearly 2,000 people at the conference all of which are committed to sorting out this world of big data and frankly we use the phrase ‘how to help people achieve or reach their information potential.’ It’s not just from a people standpoint it could be from a business decision or machine standpoint. I wonder what your thoughts are in terms of any advice that you have for professionals in this industry who are trying to harness this change and help other people achieve that potential.

RS: Well you can almost choose any area of human endeavor, but one that I think we found lots of great stories in that people respond to is in the healthcare arena. I was at the TedMed conference last year and Francis Collins, head of the National Institute for Health, said something that was quite remarkable. He told the story of how when Steve Jobs first got sick a few years ago it cost $100,000 to sequence his DNA to try to understand what he had and what might be the best course of treatment for him.Now today four or five years later the cost of sequencing someone’s DNA has dropped to about $3,000. Francis Collins believes that in another five years it might cost as little as $40 at Walgreens – like getting a flu shot. And before your doctor prescribes anything to you – even an aspirin – your DNA will have to be sequenced, its personalized medicine where the medicine has been tailored specifically for you. And the reason that this is so important is that large pharmaceutical companies for years have been spending hundreds of millions of dollars working on addressing major illnesses that people have. But often when they do clinical trials on humans and they find that even though 99% of the people taking the drug will be helped, 1% might be adversely affected or killed by it.  And therefore they can never release the product.

Collins’ point was that if each of our individual DNAs were sequenced a doctor would know who would benefit from one of these drugs and who would be harmed. If you’ve ever known anyone who’s gone through  cancer or any other illness its often a process of trial and error. The doctors try lots of different things, some of them incredibly unpleasant and in some cases making someone’s  life miserable and then it doesn’t really help. Big data has the potential of ushering in an era of personalized medicine  to help doctors go right to the correct treatment instead of all this trial and error. Again it’s the idea of using a bullet instead of a shotgun to treat the problem. And you see this in industry after industry, healthcare is obviously one that affects us all very deeply.

————————-

Make sure to check back next week to read part two of three of this transcript.