We’ve featured lots of stories about Big Data over the last several months, but here’s a fascinating new one that illustrates the value of Big Data analytics in addressing important national priorities. Researchers at SENSEable City Lab — a new research initiative of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology — together with colleagues at GE Healthymagination have analyzed data from over 7 million electronic medical records, illustrating in a powerful visual the (sometimes surprising) relationships between medical conditions on the basis of the frequency of co-occurrences. They’re calling this extensive disease network the “Health InfoScape.” When you have heartburn, do you also feel nauseous? Or if you’re experiencing insomnia, do you tend to put on a […]

Also in this week’s Nature, a fascinating review of an album of evolved music, composed by the Darwinian computer program Iamus, that is “at the very least musically ‘plausible’”: If a computer can produce an artwork that moves us, does it take artificial intelligence beyond an important threshold? That is one of the questions raised by Iamus, an algorithm that composes music from scratch, developed by Francisco Vico and his colleagues at the University of Malaga in Spain.   Iamus, an album of compositions by the algorithm — including two orchestral pieces played by the London Symphony Orchestra — comes out on 1 September. A live performance of several Iamus pieces […]