Yesterday we were pleased to announce an exciting new partnership with Columbia University, the Advanced Data Visualization Project (ADVP). The initiative, based at Columbia’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation (GSAPP), will facilitate research into data visualization and its implications for academia and industry in a world increasingly awash with data. The project will explore data visualization applications in various fields, including journalism, science, medicine and public health, law, architecture, planning and political science and utilize experts from the university, Thomson Reuters and outside researchers. Thomson Reuters will be actively engaged with the program and lead one of six flagship visualization projects.

As the university unit devoted to the future of cities, the GSAPP at Columbia University is in a unique position to galvanize this university-wide project on the future of data visualization. As the world’s leading source of intelligent information to businesses and professionals, we believe Thomson Reuters is in a unique position to support the highest level of research throughout this project.

For more details about this exciting new partnership, you can watch the full session (below) from the Aspen Ideas Festival featuring a discussion between our CTO James Powell, Edwin Schlossberg and Mark Wigley of Columbia University. The session, titled “Information’s Beautiful Future,” explored the potential of data visualization to harness and communicate information clearly and dynamically.

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Some of the most interesting, provocative and salient quotes we heard around the Aspen Ideas Festival today:

“Well-off people don’t think the Affordable Care Act has anything to do with them. You are wrong. We’re all going to have electronic records, we will all go to safer hospitals, and we all will have a situation where doctors are better at focusing on chronic illnesses.” — Ezekiel Emanuel, Vice Provost, Global Initiatives & Chair of the Medical Ethics and Health Policy Department, University of Pennsylvania

“Cities are the first social media platform – cities accelerate connectivity.” – Mark Wigley, Dean of Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation

“I think the word data is useful because it sounds so unloaded, but actually data is just a word we use to point to a huge thing we have no grasp of that is neither in the world of objects nor the world of images… We are living a life so much stranger than we are willing to acknowledge.” – Mark Wigley

“We’re rapidly moving to the point where a single point narrative is becoming irrelevant and where co-creation, collaboration and interdependent experiences are becoming very relevant.” – Edward Schlosserg, Founder and Principal Designer, ESI Design

“Data visualization is an important mechanism that allows decision makers to gain critical insights and mine and navigate relationships between data sets.” – James Powell, Chief Technology Officer, Thomson Reuters

“The collaborative model is fascinating – allowing a community to take a view of what the data means.” – James Powell

Another exciting day here at the Aspen Ideas Festival began with another in the Festival’s CEO Series, featuring Dr. Anthony Coles, president and CEO of Onyx Pharmaceuticals, Inc.

Other sessions included a Thomson Reuters Knowledge Exchange event, “Information’s Beautiful Future,” featuring our chief technology officer, James Powell, in conversation with Edwin Schlossberg, founder and principal designer of ESI Design and Mark Wigley, dean of Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, discussing our new advanced data visualization partnership with Columbia.

In the afternoon, Thomson Reuters Foundation CEO Monique Villa moderated a panel discussion titled, “The Politics of Sex,” with Christopher Elias, president of the Global Development Program of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation; Musimbi Kanyoro, president and CEO of the Global Fund for Women, and Timothy E. Wirth, president of the United Nations Foundation and Better World Fund. The session was presented with support from United States Agency for International Development.

 

 

The country’s growth was stunning but its attempt to move its economy to one that consumes from one that manufactures won’t work, says Atlantic correspondent James Fallows.

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The rich are getting richer but the money is not trickling down. The wealthiest Americans are spending less of their money, reducing total U.S. consumption by $400 billion a year, according to Council of Economic Advisers Chairman Alan Krueger.

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Issues surrounding gender, poverty, population growth, philanthropy, foreign aid and global health were addressed at this week’s Aspen Ideas Festival. A panel discussion titled “The Politics of Sex” was moderated by Monique Villa, CEO of Thomson Reuters Foundation, and featured Dr. Chris Elias of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Musimbi Kanyoro of the Global Fund for Women, and Ezekiel Emanuel of the University of Pennsylvania. The conversation started on a harrowing note, the fact that 215 million women in the world are without contraception.

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As co-founder of Netscape, Marc Andreessen to many is a symbol of Silicon Valley success. But Reuters’ Felix Salmon says Andreessen’s projects and investments don’t always work. Salmon and Reuters West Coast Bureau Chief Jonathan Weber discuss the tech figure’s legacy.

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The Aspen Ideas Festival CEO Series included a session featuring Palantir’s Michael Lopp, interviewed by Elliot Gerson of the Aspen Institute. Palantir’s noble goal of “helping to solve the world’s problems by radically changing how groups analyze information,” has made this young, ambitious, big data company the talk of the Silicon Valley.

Palantir, which was founded in 2004 by a small group of PayPal alumni and Stanford computer scientists, works with many kinds of data: structured, unstructured, relational, temporal, and geospatial, and offers two products: one for government and one for finance. Its government solution is used by the intelligence and defense industries, and law enforcement; its finance platform is used by hedge funds and financial institutions. Lopp explains that Palantir’s primary competition is internal IT shops. “Companies come to us when their internal IT shops haven’t done what they said they could do or need to do.”

Palantir helps its customers integrate, visualize, and analyze  information, but Lopp is quick to say that Palantir is not a data visualization company. “We’re much more than that, but visualization as an arrow in our quiver is really compelling. It allows you to figure out what the story is from what you’re looking at.”

To illustrate what the company does, Lopp shared an example of how the US military uses Palantir’s government product: (more…)

Some of the most interesting, provocative and salient quotes we heard around the Aspen Ideas Festival today:

“We live in an era of massive passive data, when massive amounts of data are collected passively.” - Nicholas Christakis, Professor & Director of the Human Nature Lab, Harvard University

“Networks are agnostic: they will magnify anything, good or bad. Networks magnify whatever they are seeded with.” - Nicholas Christakis

“Information, if it reaches you at the right time, can save lives and empower you.” - Monique Villa, CEO, Thomson Reuters Foundation

“There are more mobile phones in the world than toilets or toothbrushes.” – Eric Topol, Director & Chief Academic Officer of Scripps Translational Science Institute and Scripps Health

“There are three criteria for a good project: impact, uniqueness and magic.” – Joichi Ito, Director, MIT Media Lab

“Facebook has the potential to institutionalize word of mouth.” – Shelly Lazarus, Chairman, Ogilvy & Mather

 “Women can have it all, but they can’t have all of it all at once all the time.” – Shelly Lazarus

 

 

Anne-Marie Slaughter’s Atlantic article ”Why Women Can’t Have It All” created a firestorm. Now she says women will have it all, though it may take a decade.

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