In this video from the NEAI Meetup Series, Gary King from Harvard presents: Big Data is Not About The Data!.
King’s work is widely read across scholarly fields and beyond academia. He was listed as the most cited political scientist of his cohort; among the group of “political scientists who have made the most important theoretical contributions” to the discipline “from its beginnings in the late-19th century to the present”; and on ISI’s list of the most highly cited researchers across the social sciences. His work on legislative redistricting has been used in most American states by legislators, judges, lawyers, political parties, minority groups, and private citizens, as well as the U.S. Supreme Court. His work on inferring individual behavior from aggregate data has been used in as many states by these groups, and in many other practical contexts. His contribution to methods for achieving cross-cultural comparability in survey research have been used in surveys in over eighty countries by researchers, governments, and private concerns. King led an evaluation of the Mexican universal health insurance program, which includes the largest randomized health policy experiment to date. The statistical methods and software he developed are used extensively in academia, government, consulting, and private industry. He is a founder, and an inventor of the original technology for, Crimson Hexagon, Learning Catalytics, and other firms.
For decades human resource management has been a field that relied on policies and procedures, leavened by healthy doses of intuition. But Big Data is standing H.R. on its head – many of the old assumptions are either being called into question or totally discarded.
So far, so good. But here’s the catch – before releasing the data to researchers in these fields, information identifying the individual user needs to be removed. Asks Hardesty, “…how hard could it be to protect the identity of one unnamed cellphone user in a data set of hundreds of thousands or even millions.”
