Data analysis driving societal change

Health is likely to be the next sector to be disrupted by technology, according to a panel of senior researchers at four of the world's best-known technology brands speaking at Business News' Success & Leadership breakfast this morning.

Google senior research staff scientist Evgeniy Gabrilovich is working on a project to help users determine medical conditions through the search engine.

“I lead a research team working on healthcare and Google search,” Dr Gabrilovich told the audience at the Perth Convention & Exhibition Centre.

“Google’s mission is trying to make the world’s information universally accessible and useful, and we’re trying to do the same for medical information.

“Just to give you an idea of scale, one in every 20 queries coming into Google is about health.

“It’s a huge number.

“We want to help those people to understand what their symptoms mean, how those conditions can be treated, and so on.”

Dr Gabrilovich said Google hoped to reduce the incidence of a new internet-induced phenomenon known as cyberchondria (a combination of cyber and hypochondria), whereby people search their symptoms online and panic when they see some of the possible (worst-case) causes.

Google isn’t the only company using technology in the health sector, with Fitbit, Apple and Samsung both producing wearable devices that can check pulse rate, among other things.

A further example of imminent technological disruption was in transportation, the S&L audience heard, with the introduction of autonomous cars. 

LinkedIn senior director of data science, Xin Fu, said the amount of data now being presented was incredible, and would lead to major technological improvements. 

"Artificial intelligence is definitely picking up steam in the past couple of years," he said.

"All of this data is now being leveraged and processed by an unprecedented level of computational technology and capacity. 

"When you marry the availability of the data and the capacity of computation, lots of good things are going to happen."

Dr Fu said data scientists played a very big role at LinkedIn, translating big data into business opportunities. 

An illustratiion of how rapid the impact of technology can be comes in the form of image and video sharing social media service, Snap Inc, which was founded just six years ago and now has a market capitalisation of $US24 billion.

Adjusting for exchange rate, that’s about the size of South 32 and AGL Energy put together.

LinkedIn was founded in 2004 and was bought by Microsoft last year in a $US26 billion deal.

But the biggest of them all is Alphabet Inc, the parent company of Google, which has a valuation of around $US580 billion.

However, the growth isn’t all in the corporate world.

Not for profit Wikimedia Foundation, which runs the Wikipedia site, now has 40 million active pages across 120 languages, with fewer than 300 staff.

Conference

The breakfast was held ahead of the International World Wide Web Conference in Perth, which is taking place this week.

All panellists had expertise in data, with Wikimedia Foundation senior research scientist Leila Zia, LinkedIn senior director of data science Xin Fu and Snap Inc senior technical program manager Krassi Hristova talking about the importance of technology and data science to humanity in the future.

Dr Gabrilovich, who is chair of the WWW 2017 conference program, said the web had changed and expanded in ways no-one could have anticipated since the first conference in 1994.

It started as an academic conference, he said, and was still rigorously managed as such, although now about 50 per cent of participants were from industry, with 100 businesses attending in Perth this year.

“WWW used to be focused on search and infrastructure and over the years it started to include things like crowdsourcing, things like social networking,” Dr Gabrilovich said.

At the Brisbane conference in 1998, Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin presented a paper about search engine technology.

That was seminal for two reasons, Dr Gabrilovich said.

“The first one was the realisation of how to build the world’s largest and most distributed search engine with essentially commodity (off-the-shelf) hardware,” he said.

“The second was the interconnection of the different websites on the web, hyperlinks as we call them, can be used as a relevance signal, which page is relevant of pertinent to a user’s information needs.”

Keynote speakers at this year’s conference include astrophysicist Melanie Johnston-Hollitt, who is on the board of the Square Kilometre Array project, and Australian futurist Mark Pesce.