Rick Smolan
Rick Smolan
Rick Smolan is a former TIME, LIFE and National Geographic photographer best known as the co-creator of the "Day in the Life" book series. He is currently CEO of Against All Odds Productions, a cross-media organization which utilizes the skills of hundreds of the world's leading photographers, writers, filmmakers, designers and programmers to merge creative storytelling with state-of-the-art technology...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPhotographer
Date of Birth5 November 1949
CountryUnited States of America
The world that our children living in is going to be completely different because of big data.
Sergey Brin has said to me, like, 10 times now, 'Why do you bother doing books? Why don't you just put all this stuff on the Internet?' It's because 10 years from now, my book will still be sitting on someone's coffee table or in a waiting room.
I was painfully shy when I was a kid. I always thought when most people were born, part of the toolkit was teaching you how to relate to other people - and it was just left out of my toolkit.
In 1978, 'Time' magazine sent me to do a story about children in Southeast Asia fathered by American GIs. What I saw was very upsetting, but the story they published was whitewashed.
Targeted ads, I think, are useful because I don't want to see all the crap. I'm not interested in buying a Mercedes Benz, but I am interested in buying a new MacBook Air. So if organizations like Facebook can actually make the ads more relevant to me, if they know what I am interested in, I have no problem with that.
There's a company in Boston called Ginger IO that has a smartphone app that can predict, two days before you get depressed, that you're going to get depressed.
There are a number of fascinating stories included in 'The Human Face of Big Data' that represent some of the most innovative applications of data that are shaping our future.
My dad was actually against me being a photographer. He thought it was a dead-end job and that you end up doing baby pictures and weddings.
They're trying to put data centers in cold environments because they're actually generating so much heat now; they're using up so much electricity.
Those who fear that we are losing our individualism couldn't be more wrong: Americans have never been more free to create and recreate themselves.
What amazes me is that you can have 10 different photographers in the same room, and you see 10 different rooms. You realize how much of it is the person's perspective rather than the situation itself.
A tiny apartment might hold three generations of an immigrant family.
Americans are changing right before our eyes. They are choosing different lifestyles, families, traditions and ways of living.
Big Data is just that - big. But, it's a term that is largely misunderstood and difficult to explain.