Big Data becomes Personal: Knowledge into Meaning

One of the most significant shifts in the contemporary world is the trend towards obtaining and analyzing ‘big data’ in nearly every venue of life.

However, one of the biggest outstanding challenges is turning these large volumes of impersonal quantitative data into qualitative information that can impact the quality of life of the individual in a multiplicity of areas such as happiness, well-being, goal achievement, stress reduction, and overall life satisfaction.

For this reason, I have helped to organize the AAAI Spring Symposium this week (Big data becomes personal: knowledge into meaning) at Stanford March 24-26 to explore exactly this question of turning personal data into meaning as related in Figure 1.

 

Figure 1: Turning big data into personal meaning.