[This is my introduction to a course I teach at Suffolk University, Big Data Analytics for Health. I play this video in the background.]
The
underlying theme and tone of the course is finding the light.
Using data
analytics to find the truth, to discover, to guide. We will be on this journey together for the
next 14 weeks. I hope you will become...a believer.
·
Analytics
can illuminate the facts…it can put a spotlight on the evidence--and guide decisions.
·
It
can provide insight into challenges we just have not been able to understand—through
research discoveries and precision medicine.
·
It
can automate many jobs, thereby reducing costs and improving productivity,
changing the nature of human work, and displacing hard hit workers.
·
It
can drive the creation of new, very profitable, disruptive industries.
·
It
can be used against us by exploiting our personal data for the purposes of
surveillance and marketing.
·
We
must stand on the side of light using this amazing asset for the right reasons.
I have been
a geek for most of my life. Not as a
coder or app developer. I have certainly
been a number cruncher and have done my time in the back office. Mostly been a manager specializing in data
translation--at the intersection of what the business needs and IT or research
can produce.
I knew I was
a geek in the fifth grade. I remember it
clearly. The class was boring and I did
surveys to develop class names. I
tabulated the frequency of the first, second, third, etc. letters of names in
the class., selecting the letters with the highest counts and then stringing
them out into a name. I think my most
popular name was Joram Sornt. It didn’t
catch on. But I was fascinated with
computational technologies. I remember
sailing from Nantucket to Block Island with my young children and a soupy fog
dropped down on us. It was very
scary. But we sailed on and found the
buoy exactly on target because of my GPS system. We need an elaborate GPS system for health
care.
It’s a great
time for health analytics. Data is
abundant. It’s like the gold rush. It’s there to be harvested. The tools for doing so are sophisticated in
terms of processing speeds, storage, emerging capabilities with machine
learning and artificial intelligence, and the development of talent like
yourselves.
Please join
with me to find the light. Data does not
always show the right path, sometimes it’s not very truthful at all, and all
too often it is wasted. But, in this
period we are going through where facts are dismissed, experts are forsaken,
and fake news runs wild, more than ever we need evidence, insight, and
guidance. That’s what we are going to
find in this course.
