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From using Cannabidiol to treat post-traumatic stress disorder to the expansion of artificial intelligence and big data to cure disease to fecal transplant therapy, the sessions and articles here discuss the power and perils of taking the unexpected treatment path.
We live in an interconnected world of volatility and disruption. Systems are linked in a web of dizzying and only partially visible complexity, and change in any one domain has a swift impact on many others. Join Andrew Zolli in a walking tour of emerging tools – such as next-generation satellite imagery, social media, and advanced analytics – that allow us to make sense o...
Digital systems make it possible to identify patterns and trends in global and domestic health that foster better clinical decision-making and ultimately improve outcomes. Simply put: more biological data adds up to more diagnostic and treatment information. To use these effectively, we need to scale up our capacity to aggregate data and build predictive models that allow...
Pope Francis has praised the internet as "a gift from God," extolling the possibilities it provides for "encounter and solidarity." But on many days, the internet doesn't feel so much like a gift as a curse. Increased access to information through new technologies that connect us has changed the way we live – from our need to immediately respond to emails to our constant p...
Artificial intelligence is working its way deeper into our lives. Intelligent systems are reading and responding to human emotions, playing a critical role in medicine, and gathering vast amounts of data, often without us knowing. Does this kind of technology share our motivations, desires, or hopes for the future of humanity? How can big tech companies and users of AI ste...
Many health systems are retooling to provide “patient-centered care,” defined by the Institute of Medicine as a partnership between providers and patients that respects individual preferences, needs, and values. The use of big data to individualize treatment, detect clinical trends, share best practices, and predict the risks of infection and drug side effects is also resh...
In the age of big data and the rise of the digital economy, no government agency plays a more central — or less understood — role than the mysterious National Security Agency. For years, the so-called Puzzle Palace was so secret that officials joked its acronym stood for “No Such Agency,” — until Edward Snowden published many of its biggest secrets online. Hear one of the...
A large, unsettling question looming among Washington regulators, lawmakers, and now state Attorney’s General across the US is whether the time has come to break up the big five: Facebook, Amazon, Google, Netflix, Apple. Have these powerful tech companies, once the darlings of the start-up community not twenty years past, become so dominant that they are stifling competiti...
The science on climate change is clear, yet data alone does not inspire change. We must combine science with powerful storytelling to raise awareness, drive action, and move the world to make big changes. National Geographic Explorers are on the front lines of some of the world’s most pressing issues, documenting and bringing to life the people, places, and species most im...
A defining feature of the American Dream is upward income mobility — the ideal that children will achieve a higher standard of living than their parents. Economist Raj Chetty’s research shows that children’s prospects of reaching that benchmark have fallen from 90 percent to 50 percent over the past half century. Chetty will discuss how big data can help us understand what...
From smartphones transmitting our location to ads following us as we browse the web to home appliances and devices watching us in our own homes, we live in an age of ubiquitous surveillance. And our data is not our own. How should big companies be accountable? What are our rights? And what should our rights be? Is monetized data extraction — also known as surveillance capi...
COVID-19 vastly accelerated vaccine skepticism, such that even routine childhood immunizations, including shots that had largely eliminated measles, are now being questioned. Misinformation can be as contagious as disease, undermining faith in institutions, jeopardizing public health and safety, and distorting clinical decision making. Come watch a live demonstration that...
Nothing demonstrates that health is an industry ripe for growth and change more clearly than the enthusiastic participation of venture capitalists. Far more than in the past, they are committing resources to seed start-up operations, not only in artificial intelligence and data science, but also in the life sciences and health-related services and delivery systems. Recogni...
More and more, the decisions that rule our lives are made by algorithms. From the news we see in our feeds, to whether or not we qualify for a mortgage, to the rates we pay for health insurance. And while there are demonstrable biases against marginalized communities caused by algorithms, some say the machines are innocent — they’re just doing math. But as more systems rel...
A technological future where our brain waves could be monitored and our thoughts decoded and analyzed — sometimes against our will — is not as far away as we think. But our existing legal protections and conception of human rights around cognitive liberty are trailing innovations in neurotechnology. Brain hacking tools and devices could bring massive benefits, for people s...
Meet Melanie Igwe, a 2023 Aspen Ideas: Health Fellow who’s helping people with autoimmune diseases manage their day-to-day chronic conditions through a comprehensive health app.
Meet Neale Batra, a 2022 Aspen Ideas: Health Fellow who's on a mission make the field of epidemiology more efficient, collaborative, and equitable through open-source software and training resources.
Trust is fundamental to almost every action, relationship, and transaction in society, but we live in an era when technology is rapidly changing who and how we trust. The trust we used to place in traditional institutions such as governments, banks, media, and charities has hit an all-time low, and trust now flows horizontally through systems and networks that are as likel...