Tag Archives: risks

Two invited talks in Boston on smart cities

Rob Kitchin gave two invited talks in Boston last week concerning Programmable City research.

The first was at UMass Boston, sponsored by APA-MA, BSA, MAPC, MAPD, MACDC, BRA, Mel King Institute, and was entitled ‘Planning in the era of smart urbanism.  The slides for the talk can be found at: http://www.slideshare.net/robkitchin/planning-in-an-era-of-smart-urbanism

The second was at the launch of MIT’s new Institute for Data, Systems and Society and was entitled ‘Ethics and risks of urban big data and smart cities’. The slides for the talk can be found at: http://www.slideshare.net/robkitchin/the-ethics-and-risks-of-urban-big-data-and-smart-cities  A video of the event can be found at: https://idss2016.mit.edu/

New paper: Big data and official statistics

A new paper by Rob Kitchin – Big data and official statistics: Opportunities, challenges and risks – has been published on SSRN as Programmable City Working Paper 9.  The abstract runs thus:

The development of big data is set to be a significant disruptive innovation in the production of official statistics offering a range of opportunities, challenges and risks to the work of national statistical institutions (NSIs).  This paper provides a synoptic overview of these issues in detail, mapping out the various pros and cons of big data for producing official statistics, examining the work to date by NSIs in formulating a strategic and operational response to big data, and plotting some suggestions with respect to on-going change management needed to address the use of big data for official statistics.

The argument is pretty much distilled into this table:big data and official statistics

Download PDF