Bridging The Gaps: A Portal For Curious Minds

In the era of big data and super-fast information capturing and processing systems, it is easy to imagine that we have all the information that lead to actionable insights, that we need to make good decisions. However, according to David Hand, Emeritus Professor of Mathematics and Senior Research Investigator at Imperial College London, the data we have are never complete. Just as much of the universe is composed of dark matter, invisible to us but nonetheless present, the universe of information is full of dark data that we overlook at our peril. In his new book “Dark Data: Why What You Don’t Know Matters” Professor David Hand takes us on a fascinating and enlightening journey into the world of the data we don't see. As in his book “Brief Answers to the Big Questions” Stephen Hawking notes “No matter how powerful a computer you have, if you put lousy data in you will get lousy predictions out”, it is essential to understand anomalies and imperfections that a dataset may have. These imperfections may lead t