January 23, 2014

WTIA launched its new Tech Author Series this month that will welcome authors from around the country to lead discussions about hot topics in the worlds of technology and business.

Our first author was Erez Aiden, co-inventor of the fascinating Google Ngram Viewer and co-author of “Uncharted: Big Data as a Lens to Human Culture.”

Aiden led a wide-ranging talk about how big data is changing science, humanities, politics, business, and our culture. He joined us from the Baylor College of Medicine, where he is an assistant professor of genetics and directs the Center for Genome Architecture. He also teaches computer science and applied mathematics at Rice University.

During a humorous and interactive discussion Aiden explained his invention, the Google Ngram Viewer, which is a web-based tool that uses the massive Google Books archive to show how words and phrases were used in books over periods of time.

While working with Google on the viewer, Aiden had access to 10 million books that held 1 trillion words. The team then narrowed their scope to 5 million books, or 500 billion words, of good data. If you typed all of those words in 12-point font it would reach to the moon and back ten times over. 

From there, Aiden and his co-creator tracked n-grams – words and phrases up to five words – in these books and compared word usages over time.

 

After explaining the Google Ngram Viewer, Aiden demonstrated how it worked, the interesting information it uncovered about human culture, and the implications that information has for analyzing our shared human history.

The tool “has enabled researchers to track how our language has evolved over time, how art has been censored, how fame can grow and fade, how nations trend toward war, how we remember and how we forget.”

Aiden, for example, used the viewer to show the widespread censorship of mentions of Tiananmen Square in Chinese books during the protests of 1989.

It was a fascinating conversation that began with one technology topic, big data, and led to a far broader discussion about how technology can help uncover mysteries of human culture.

Be sure to check out the full audio recording on our YouTube channel. If you’re interested in purchasing his book, we offer it at a discounted price. Please contact Kelly Mayeda for more information.

Our next Tech Author event will feature Bob Sutton, bestselling author of “Scaling Up Excellence.” Chris DeVore, a local tech leader will moderate a discussion with Bob about overcoming the scaling problem on February 26. More info.