From Data to Stories: What Making a Billion Charts Has Taught Me about the World

  • Cesar Hidalgo | MIT Media Lab

In this talk I will present five big data visualization engines created by The Macro Connections group at The MIT Media Lab and I will show how I have used these visualizations to improve our understanding of economic development, cultural production, and cities. The data visualization engines are (i) the Observatory of Economic Complexity (atlas.media.mit.edu)–a comprehensive tool for exploring international trade data–(ii) DataViva (dataviva.info)–a high-resolution visualization engine of the entire economy of Brazil–(iii) Pantheon (pantheon.media.mit.edu)–a project exploring cultural production and collective memory; (iv) Immersion (immersion.media.mit.edu), a tool that creates a visual interface for email centered on people rather than on messages; and (v) Place Pulse and StreetScore (pulse.media.mit.edu & streetscore.media.mit.edu) a data collection/computer vision project that is helping us understand the aesthetic capital of cities.

Speaker Details

César A. Hidalgo heads the Macro Connections group at The MIT Media Lab and is also the ABC Career Development Professor of Media Arts and Sciences at MIT. Hidalgo’s work focuses on understanding the evolution of information in natural, social, and economic systems, and on the development of big data visualization engines designed to make available unwieldy volumes of data. Hidalgo’s academic publications have been cited more than 5,000 times and his visualization engines have received more than 5 million visits. He is the author of Why Information Grows (Penguin UK, Basic Books US, Forthcoming June 2, 2015) and the co-author of The Atlas of Economic Complexity (MIT Press).

    • Portrait of Jeff Running

      Jeff Running

Series: Microsoft Research Talks