The Case for Digital Globish
When a computer scientist and a CEO discuss how to harness the power of Big Data, how good is their understanding? The answer is limited, at best, even though they both speak English.
We are on the brink of learning how to exploit Big Data, those highly complex data sets which could yield huge benefits to our society. But there is a communication gap between the digital academics and data scientists on the one hand, and the psychologists and business community, who want to put the data to work, on the other.
This was highlighted recently when Future Care (UK) Ltd was invited to take part in Data City Data Nation (DCDN), a world-class initiative by Digital Catapult, aimed at bringing Big Data communities together to: ‘develop smart solutions to real-life challenges’. The launch of DCDN’s healthcare and wellness challenge offered the opportunity to tackle challenges like finding commonalties within our data and other data sets, in order to identify reactive and preventative health algorithms and other innovations.
We formulated our DCDN challenge and described it to the data scientists, but found they could not see things from our point of view. There was a gulf between the way we saw things and the way the academics and psychologists did. They stuck to their proscriptive, linear methodology, while we wanted to take a freer, multi-dimensional approach, digging into the data and seeing where it could take us. They wanted a precise question while we wanted serendipitous discovery. We lacked a common language and understanding; we lacked Globish.
When a computer scientist and a CEO discuss how to harness the power of Big Data, how good is their understanding? The answer is limited, at best, even though they both speak English.
Globish is the term coined by Jean-Paul Nerrière, retired vice president of IBM in the US, for the pared-down version of English used in the business world to overcome language barriers. Nerrière points out that non-native English speakers can communicate more easily between themselves using Globish than native English speakers can with non-native speakers.
And there is a parallel in the digital business world. We need a digital equivalent of Globish, to communicate what Big Data is in terms that business can understand. The concept of Big Data so innovative that we need new ways to describe it, which allow us to see the world in a totally different way.
But the digital experts also need to learn to use a simpler, common language when we talk about Big Data and its applications. This new way of communicating, or digital Globish, could set Big Data free from universities and computer labs and allow business to harness its full potential to improve lives.
Media Contact Details:
Andrew Cowen, Founder & Chairman/CEO, +44 7905 756 769 info@futhurecareuk.com
Technical queries: Bradford Rogers, MD, +44 7541 937385 Brad.Rogers@futurecareuk.com
Blog: http://futurecareuk.blogspot.co.uk/
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| Andrew Cowen - Chairman |
Data City Data Nation – ‘Health and Wellbeing Challenge’
Title: Big Data - Hidden Treasures
Big Data is comparable to the arts in that it offers a plethora of interpretations, but most importantly, both have hidden meanings and offer different ways of interacting with our world and understanding it. Delving deep into Big Data is an odyssey of discovery, like a Renaissance explorer seeking to find out about the world. We peer into a forest of multi-layered information streams. Pursuing just one can take us on an exciting journey, but following multi layers of data streams opens up an entire new, exciting, multidimensional landscape of representations that goes way beyond our current grasp of things.
The Challenge:
Digital Catapult’s Data City Data Nations initiative and research challenge is one such odyssey. Big Data affords a myriad of possibilities and opportunities, limited solely by our own imaginations. It will be a game changer in our understanding of things. I write as a commercial and creative contributor to the Data City Data Nations programme, with my company providing a sample set of 100 anonymised users’ real-time health and wellbeing data, captured over eighteen months and linked to demographics and medical conditions. Combined with other data sets that Digital Catapult has brought together, these combined data sets are likely to reveal astounding insights, e.g. Big Data analysis of those with Alzheimers dementia helped refocus research away from one area of the brain and re-focus efforts instead on the patient’s immune system. Our Big Data challenge is to seek correlations between our real-time data in relation to medical conditions and to see if there are any opportunities to develop preventative and reactive health algorithms.
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| Wellbeing APP |
The opportunity to be part of Digital Catapult’s Data City Data Nations - ‘Health & Wellbeing’ and later ‘Population’ exploration. Digital Catapult’s initiative puts Dig Data in the spotlight. This opportunity offers my company huge benefits, and by extension our partners and the commercial and academic and research communities, as well as society as a whole. Big Data is a currency that cannot be ignored. Failure to take on board this information revolution and incorporate Big Data into our respective ecosystems is a risk.
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| Circadian Rhythm |
The data in itself is nothing new, but organisations tend to be complacent about the value of the data wealth they hold. Upscaling this and working in collaboration with others in the UK as well as in the international community, is a game changer, heralding a new era.
Using our imaginations and entrepreneurialism, the analytical tools currently at our disposal, and Digital Catapults effrots to reach out to the international community and provide a free ‘sandpit’ of data sets to play with, we truly enter a brave new world.
As an entrepreneur with a love of the arts, I am impatient to see what comes out of this fast-evolving and shape-shifting picture. Technology today helps us answer many questions, but Dig Data can throw up more and provide insights, revealing what we haven’t realised or questioned before, because like all journeys you never know or see what’s just around the corner.
Andrew Cowen, Founder and CEO of The Future Care (UK) Ltd
