Is Big Data Enough? A Summary of a Ted Talk by Tricia Wang and my Thoughts
Hello Everyone! I recently watched another Ted Talk titled “The human insights missing from big data,” by Tricia Wang, and wanted to write about what I thought about it. In her talk, as the title suggests, she discusses how big data cannot do justice to the task of predicting patterns, and that human insight (or what she calls "thick data") combined with quantifiable data will elevate the performance of companies and nonprofits, making them more profitable and more robust in the face of the future. What Wang Discusses In 2009, Wang took up a research role at Nokia, when the company was dominating the emerging markets of the cellphone industry. Wang talks about her experience in an urban slum in China, where she spent years selling dumplings to construction workers, learning about the kids' habits, and gathering quantifiable data on the population. Piecing together all she had learned, she discovered something the wide array of Nokia's ...