Beyond ad clicks: using ‘Big Data’ for social good

Marketplace Tech

There is a growing interest in “big data,” the science of collecting large amounts of information and making sense of it.

For a long time, this was the provenance of companies. Why? Because they have collected so much data – about what we buy, what we spend, and what ads we respond to, among other things. But the field is evolving. In 2008 and 2012, data science became a major part of political campaigns. Now, governments and nonprofits are beginning to see it as a way to tackle social problems.

After a decade digging through corporate data, Rayid Ghani wanted to do something different. “I decided one day just to arbitrarily pick a date to quit,” he says.

Ghani, an expert on information retrieval and machine learning, gave himself three months to find a job – a position with the potential for what he calls “social impact.” A few weeks later, he became the chief scientist on President Obama’s re-election campaign. “It was a fairly random detour,” he says. Ghani and his team did pioneering work on fundraising and analytics.

For now, Ghani is done with politics, but he says that detour was eye-opening. It showed him that data science has other applications.

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