Information can be scary, and even more so when we find ourselves humbled by its immensity. In a press release issued earlier this week, the European Commission has once again demonstrated that it is not afraid of big data. Quite the opposite, Europe is more than ever ready to embrace it – a gesture, which is reflected in Europe’s strong bet on research projects like CEEDs, which uses big data to enhance human cognition and improve problem solving.

In a previous post, we already discussed CEEDs and the eXperience Induction Machine (XIM), the heart of the project, located in the SPECS lab at Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona. The press release singles out CEEDs as an example of successful and highly promising big data research initiative.

Although XIM has so far mainly been applied to visualising brain (BrainX3) and historical (Bergen-Belsen reconstruction) data and will certainly bring about a huge qualitative change in how scientists work with tremendous amounts of information, the integration of this technology into more down-to-earth application fields seems imminent.

The press release reports that early interest in the XIM technology is already coming from several museums in Germany, the Netherlands, the UK and the United States, where it could potentially help with gathering and reacting to feedback from visitors. This naturally applies to many other public spaces such as shops, libraries and concerts. The CEEDs team is also conducting negotiations with several public, charity and commercial organisations to further extend the scope of application of the platform.

The CEEDs project coordinator Jonathan Freeman, Professor of Psychology at Goldsmiths, University of London pointed out that “anywhere where there’s a wealth of data that either requires a lot of time or an incredible effort, there is potential.” In science, whole disciplines, from satellite imagery inspection to oil prospecting and astronomy, could benefit immensely from this novel approach to processing information.

With projects like CEEDs, Europe is working its way towards a new data-driven economy, a long-time goal, which the European Commission is now actively promoting across national governments. The European approach towards big data is perhaps best expressed in the words of the vice-president of the European Commission Neelie Kroes: “Big data doesn’t have to be scary. Projects like this enable us to take control of data and deal with it so we can get to solving problems. Leaders need to embrace big data.”

You can also read this article to learn about some other exciting big data projects backed by the European Commission.

We live in a time when the scale of scientific research is undergoing an unprecedented exponential growth, which contributes to the generation of equally unprecedented amounts of data. Disciplines like neuroscience, astronomy or particle physics are piling up so much information that finding and implementing new ways of representing, navigating and manipulating this information is rapidly becoming a pressing necessity.

One specifically promising method relies on the use of virtual and mixed reality platforms. What could be more intuitive and useful for, say, a neuroscientist trying to make sense of a huge and seemingly chaotic brain data set than an ability to fly through its virtual gesture-controlled representation and actually experience the properties of data in search for meaningful patterns.

The eXperience Induction Machine (XIM), built in the SPECS lab at Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona, is one example of such immersive spaces, which is currently applied to work precisely with data collected from the human brain. XIM allows researchers to visualize a brain connectome, the network of nodes and connections that defines what is going on in our vital organ. XIM is now a key part of the Collective Experience of Emphatic Data Systems (CEEDs), a European project seeking to develop a whole set of tools to bring big data visualisation to a new level.

XIM can be hooked up to a series of sensors that measure such parameters as the user’s heart rate, skin conductance, eye gaze and brain activity. This allows the system to register certain subconscious patterns, associated with how we perceive and process information, and guide the user’s attention to areas of potential interest that would otherwise remain unnoticed. This feature, along with XIM’s increased interactivity, is what really makes XIM stand out in comparison with some other state-of-the-art virtual and mixed reality systems such as the AlloSphere at the California Nanosystems Institute or the CAVE2 at the University of Illinois at Chicago. 

Earlier this month, SPECS and CEEDs showcased their platform for embodied exploration of neural data at the 16^th edition of Laval Virtual, the largest virtual technology conference in Europe. You can see a complete photo report from the event HERE.