is the community , how wealthy is the community , and this is leading us to lots of new applications .
So , for instance in our context , we ’ ve been able to map poverty in places that have had no information before . Kenya Power can be able to plan where the electric grid should be rolled out because we can see patterns of people moving and getting richer . Roads and Transport Ministry , NTSA and County governments are able , through deployment of big data solutions , to do things like figure out how to change the road system and the transportation system to better fit the population .
Ministry of Health and development partners can even improve public health by being able to figure out where diseases propagate because of course diseases tend to propagate as people interact with each other .
This ability to see the pulse of the society and measure it using these new big data sources has been very exciting for a lot of people . The UN Secretary General has embarked on what he called the UN Data Revolution using these sort of techniques to measure all sorts of things about society in every country on earth , measuring poverty , inequality , forced migrations , and lack of sustainability among others .
We are entering a world that ’ s really highly instrumented using this big data where we can cure problems and detect problems very early on using these big data sources . And that ’ s the positive side of things .
On the other side things there ’ s privacy and security that we have to worry about , and of course in between is for-profit business , which is going to be data to serve customers better .
Social Physics : Behavioral Psychology Meets Statistics
What is this Social Physics stuff ? Well , the Social Physics stuff is statistics meets big data to understand people and it ’ s a phrase that ’ s about two centuries old . It ’ s where our modern notion of census and , you know , countrywide statistics comes from , but now it ’ s got a lot more detail than it ever had before .
A little while ago I attended a conference and made acquaintance ’ s with my former University comrades and of course exchanging contacts both cellphone numbers and emails . In the evening , while trying to scroll through my social media timeline , I saw a connection referral , the one that notifies you that we thought you might know this person so send them a connection request .
From then hence forth I started paying attention to the suggested friend connection on Facebook and LinkedIn and trust you me I did notice a pattern after not very long . Every day I would enter a new phone number in my phone book and connect to a wi-fi proximity network , I will find a suggested friend request . That is social physics and big data at work !
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