Big Data at the Personal Level

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Stephen Wolfram, physicist, mathematician and complexity theorist, has taken big data ideas to an entirely new level — he’s quantifying himself and his relationships. He calls this discipline personal analytics. While examining every phone call and computer keystroke he’s made may be rather useful to the FBI or to marketers, it is not until that personal data is tracked for physiological and medical purposes that it could become extremely valuable. But then again who wants their every move tracked 24 hours a day, even for medical science? From ars technica: Don’t be surprised if Stephen Wolfram, the renowned complexity theorist, software company CEO, and night owl, wants to schedule a work call with you at 9 p.m. In fact, after a decade of logging every phone call he makes, Wolfram knows the exact probability he’ll be on the phone with someone at that time: 39 percent. Wolfram, a British-born physicist who earned a doctorate at age 20, is obsessed with data and the… Read more