Big Data knows where you’ve been and who your friends are. It knows what you like and what makes you angry. It can predict what you’ll buy, where you’ll be the victim of crime and when you’ll have a heart attack. Big Data knows you better than you know yourself, or so it claims.
But how well do you know big data? From science to smart cities, business to politics, self-quantification to the Internet of Things, people are talking about big data as a force for change. Privacy, democracy, even our ideas of who we are, could be transformed.
But you don't need to be a Silicon Valley tech prodigy to understand what's going on. Join Timandra Harkness to find out all about the world of “big data”, artificial intelligence, robots and mobility.
Timandra has (approximately 86.11% of) an Open University degree in Mathematics & Statistics, but just as importantly she is an experienced writer, broadcaster and comedian. She has been performing on scientific, mathematical and statistical topics since the latter days of the 20th Century. She has written about travel for the Sunday Times, motoring for the Telegraph, science & technology for WIRED, BBC Focus Magazine and Men's Health Magazine, and on being 'Seduced by Stats' for Significance (the Journal of the Royal Statistical Society). She is a regular on BBC Radio, resident reporter on social psychology series The Human Zoo as well as writing and presenting documentaries and BBC Radio 4's FutureProofing series.
In 2010 she co-wrote and performed Your Days Are Numbered: The Maths of Death, with stand-up mathematician Matt Parker, which was a sell-out hit at the Edinburgh Fringe before touring the rest of the UK and Australia. Science comedy since then includes solo show Brainsex, cabarets and gameshows. She is currently writing a new comedy show about Big Data. Meanwhile, she puts her MC skills to more serious uses, hosting and chairing events with Cheltenham Science Festival, the British Council, the Institute of Ideas, the Wellcome Collection and a Robotics conference in Moscow, among many others.
Timandra is a Visiting Fellow (Knowledge Exchange) in Big Data, Information Rights and Public Engagement with the Centre for Information Rights at the University of Winchester. She speaks with authority, intellectual rigour and humour to varied audiences, and claims to be neither a technophile nor a technophobe when looking into the future.