The 3L Mantra to live by!

My paper, "Bottom of the Data Pyramid, Big data and the Global South" has been published in the International Journal of Communication , an open access journal. This work is a build-up from the blog that I wrote earlier on regarding this topic for   Discover Society  as well as a couple of keynotes I gave in 2015 at the Technology, Knowledge & Society Conference in Berkeley and IS4IS Summit in Vienna.  Basically, this paper argues that so far, little attention has been given to the impact of big data in the Global South, about 60% of whose residents are below the poverty line. Big data manifests in novel and unprecedented ways in these neglected contexts. For instance, India has created biometric national identities for her 1.2 billion people, linking them to welfare schemes, and social entrepreneurial initiatives like the Ushahidi project that leveraged crowdsourcing to provide real-time crisis maps for humanitarian relief. While these projects are indeed inspir...

It was a wonderful experience to serve as a Plenary Speaker for the Technology, Knowledge & Society Conference held this time at the University of Berkeley, California. The theme was ' Big Data and the Politics of Participation in a Digital Age .' Since the other plenary speaker  Deirdre K. Mulligan  from Berkeley's School of Information was talking primarily on the legality of big data and how diverse corporations interpret compliance in the United States and Europe, it was nice to contrast this with perspectives from the global South. After all, most of the conversation around big data seems to be hijacked by Western concerns, issues and contexts. My talk, ' Bottom of the Data Pyramid: Big data perspectives from the global South ' played with the much hyped Development idea on the bop as a new consumer base, inverting decades of viewing the poor in the global South as passive beneficiaries to now active co-creators of their own data.What do we know after...

Dr Anita Goel on Personalized medicine It’s nice to know you’re special. Anita Goel backs this up with science, showing that no two people are alike in their molecular profiles, and as such no two treatments can be alike. Tailored diagnostics – personalized medicine has come to our doorsteps. Covered with ivy, Dr. Goel is a product of Harvard-MIT and Stanford, a physicist, a physician, founder and CEO of Nanobiosym, a company that has a not-so-humble vision to “to revolutionize healthcare globally.” She states that their goal is to give patients worldwide real-time access to their own diagnostic information via low-cost handheld devices and provide a personalized approach to cure through one’s genetic makeup. So what, individualism is the new holism? For more, check out the TEDx site: Dr Anita Goel: healthcare at your digital fingertips