News & Analysis
Slideshow: Berkeley wields big data to beat cancer
Rick Merritt
2/15/2013 5:38 AM EST
Building the smart building
Click on image to enlarge.
Building automation provides an interesting case study for the troubles with the emerging Internet of things, said one grad student at the event. Modern buildings such as Berkeley’s new computer science center may have as many as 6,000 active sensors (above), but even such smart structures typically require painful custom work pulling together separate systems into one network (below).
Click on image to enlarge.
Click on image to enlarge.
Building automation provides an interesting case study for the troubles with the emerging Internet of things, said one grad student at the event. Modern buildings such as Berkeley’s new computer science center may have as many as 6,000 active sensors (above), but even such smart structures typically require painful custom work pulling together separate systems into one network (below).
Click on image to enlarge.
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iniewski
2/15/2013 10:31 AM EST
Very interesting...personally I think we should stop worrying about privacy, open the the platform and unleash the IoT apps..privacy is such as last century concept ;-)
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rick.merritt
2/16/2013 9:21 AM EST
As Scott McNealy used to say, privacy is over.
But the truth is it remains a viable concern for many, many individuals--including engineers who are reticent to publicly comment on stories as you do!
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docdivakar
2/19/2013 6:05 PM EST
@iniewski & @rick.merritt: the security issue is paramount to the adoption and acceptance of apps from IoT. In the healthcare arena, there are various regulations in US (like HIPAA, etc.) protecting the privacy of patient data.
Kris is partially right in saying that real privacy is so much a last century concept -one has to accept that up to some extent, service providers (mobiles phones for example) are constantly harvesting to target marketing. These types of 'private' data are several steps removed from personal medical records whose sanctity should be fully preserved and protected.
Some willingly give up personal data -most Facebook users fall into this category. I shudder to think of Facebook accessing my personal-area-network generated data from medical monitoring!
MP Divakar
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przemek
2/19/2013 1:40 PM EST
I had this insight that privacy was a fleeting phenomenon that developed in the mid-19th century when lots of people moved into cities, and lasted until recently. Before urbanization, people lived in small communities where everybody knew everything about everybody else--and Facebook is bringing it back :)
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DrQuine
2/17/2013 9:54 PM EST
The title of the article mentions cancer (although the body of the article seems to be computer hardware oriented). I believe that "cures" for cancer are often going to be very dependent upon individual genetic differences. Understanding which treatments work for which genetic make-ups is essential. Certainly there will need to be safeguards to prevent data mining to identify individuals in the database - but our future health depends upon such "big data" resources.
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aquitaine
2/19/2013 2:05 AM EST
Even though the actual treatment will be individually tailored, but the important thing is we'll know exactly what needs to be done to make it go away.
Personally I have my doubts we'll see anything from this anytime soon. Overall the War on Cancer has been a dismal failure, 40 years on and little practical result to show for it. There is one bright spot that I've seen, there has been a lot of success with HIV based immune therapies.
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any1
2/18/2013 8:02 PM EST
This is good stuff. It will be interesting to see how fast these initiatives progress. Of course 60 million dollars over 10 years is not a lot of money really.
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pete22
2/20/2013 4:56 AM EST
These kinds of initiatives are almost always about the institutional search for research money. Berkely will pump it for all it is worth.
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