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
As individuals, we have very little say about how our data is being used. I'm not worried about the privacy implications of it so much. But it seems to me that, as an individual, if I'm the one generating the data, I should have some kind of say in how it's going to be used.
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.
My company, Against All Odds Productions, has done print on demand; we were the first to do a book with a CD-ROM in the early 1990s. We do custom covers. It's always fun to do something new.
Some of the pictures in 'The Human Face of Big Data' will bring tears to your eyes; others are so surprising or memorable that you just have to show them to your friends and family.
The ability to collect, analyze, triangulate and visualize vast amounts of data in real time is something the human race has never had before. This new set of tools, often referred by the lofty term 'Big Data,' has begun to emerge as a new approach to addressing some of the biggest challenges facing our planet.
The 'America at Home' project was aimed at being the most extensive record of American home life ever attempted, and we were amazed at how many people were willing to participate as photographers or to welcome the photographers into their homes.
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.
The people who are thinking most about big data right now are corporations and governments.
I find Facebook absolutely fascinating because I don't think there's ever been any one source that had so much information about each of us - who we talk to, who our friends are, what books we read, what we're buying, what movies we saw, what our travel is.
Programmers have been wandering out and shooting a shotgun into the night sky and hoping they hit something, and I end up paying $150 for channels full of nothing I want to watch.
The world that our children living in is going to be completely different because of big data.
A lot of people don't want to know, but I'd like to know if I have a 10 percent or a 90 percent chance of developing Alzheimer's some day. If I know I'm likely to develop it, I'm certainly going to start looking around right now to find if there is something that I can do to offset it.
'America 24/7' will be a landmark series in documentary photography and the watershed event of the new digital photography age.
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.