Info 202 Fall 2011

It is an experience most of us can relate to, when we walk into a shop or bookstore with just a fuzzy idea of what we are looking for. A few strolls down the isles and one or two items are sure to catch your eye. Things you may not have known exist but that suddenly seem to be exactly what you want.

Evoz has taken a data source popularly believed to be of little value and transforming it into potentially life saving information. Evoz decided to look into the communication of babies at their most intense point: when they are crying.

Prior to the digitization movement, there were two obstacles of information discovery. The first, barriers of awareness, refers to the information that we cannot access because we do not know it exists. The second, barriers of accessibility, deals with the information that we know exists, but is out of our reach.

23andMe and CureTogether – two online services that were inspired by the grass-roots Quantified Self movement – are leveraging the contributions of passionate users to create a continuously growing pool of anonymized data that they can mine in order to draw scientific conclusions and present health recommendations for consumers in an organized and accessible format. Typically medical studies are extremely costly, time-consuming, and difficult, regardless of whether one is researching common or esoteric condition but the hope here is that crowd-sourcing and data-mining will enable them to leverage network effects and reach faster results.