PopTech and the Rockefeller Foundation are proud to announce the call for nominations for a unique joint Fellows program focused on unconventional collaboration.
The Bellagio/PopTech Fellows program will bring together four to six individuals from diverse backgrounds for a two-week immersion residency at the Rockefeller Foundation’s renowned Bellagio Center on the shores of Lake Como, Italy.
This year’s program will focus on building community resilience through the use of data science, visualization, and distributed information technologies. Fellows will explore the extent to which big data and related technology can be used to enhance psychological, social and systemic resilience worldwide. This effort will be creative, interdisciplinary and collaborative – providing an environment where emerging tools, approaches and solutions are viewed as an art as much as a science.
The program is seeking candidates from the fields of data and data visualization, technology, design, art, social and natural sciences, resilience research, and other social domains. A diverse cohort of Fellows will be chosen for their technical and creative excellence and their demonstrated ability to work and think across disciplines.
Candidates may self-nominate or be nominated by someone else. Eligibility details are available on the call for nominations web page.
Know someone who might be a good fit? Nominations will be accepted through March 1, 2013, and can be submitted via the online nomination form.
“I come here today because I am excited about data, but also because I am terrified. I am terrified that we are having progress without culture in the world of data.”
Jer Thorp, who has launched The Office For Creative Research, explores the boundaries between science, data, art, and culture. His work has appeared in the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan.
“If you look across the globe, there are severe inequalities in how people access and use finance.”
As director of the Global Financial Inclusion Initiative at Yale University and Innovations for Poverty Action, Aishwarya Ratan’s goal is to ensure that the financial products, services and tools available to the poor to manage and grow their money are affordable, efficient, secure and welfare-enhancing.
Peter Kareiva, Chief Scientist, The Nature Conservancy
For more, watch Peter’s 2012 PopTech talk.
Data isn’t just the new oil, it’s the new money. Ask Zoë Keating →
People love to call data the new oil, but that might be selling it short. It’s only oil when we’re talking about pools of unrefined data like the stuff web companies collect, which has to be processed and transformed into something useful. There are certain types of data, though — especially data about consumers — that are as good as money in the bank without any work at all. And if you don’t believe me, ask popular cellist Zoë Keating.
As a bill attempting to lower the royalty rates paid to artists by streaming music services such as Pandora works its way through Congress, Keating took to her Tumblr blog last week and offered a solution that both sides should listen to, but won’t. You might have read about her stance in Billboard or ITworld already, or perhaps on Slashdot. If you haven’t, here it is in a nutshell, from Keating’s blog: “The law only demands I be paid in money, which at this point in my career is not as valuable as information. I’d rather be paid in data.”
Cellist Zoë Keating (PopTech 2009) uses a cello and a small box of electronics to create a one-woman avant-garde orchestra.
When will data-powered personalized health hit ‘escape velocity’?
A handful of leaders in health data suggest that data-driven personalized health approaches could achieve mainstream adoption in five years, with some saying valuable but intermittent work could happen even sooner.
From gadgets that monitor our activity and vital signs, to startups that let us explore our own DNA - there are more technologies than ever for collecting and analyzing personal health data.
For now, the applications of personal health data are mostly the stuff of “Quantified Self” hobbyists and experimental research. But some say it may not be too long before personal health data becomes a powerful part of the mainstream clinical experience.
(via futuramb, smarterplanet)
