Sparks

Abstract

What sparks a flashmob? What starts the emergence of a self-organized social movement, political change, technological breakthrough, and other chain-reactions leading to the rise or collapse of a new milieu? Ideas, movements, and products are sparked by a highly evolved sense-making mechanism that has emerged over the past decade to make sense of big data---copious volumes of online documents, email, tweets, and probes collected via the Internet. This data has to be reduced by analyzing its wave-like and probabilistic behavior. In a highly connected interdependent world, ordinary probability is replaced by conditional or Bayesian probability, which in turn leads to Levy flights and long-tailed events widely ranging from making sense of big Internet data to finding and killing Osama bin Laden. Thus, the 21st century is an era of massive data processing unheard of just a decade ago. This transformation leads to an unanswered question, ``Is the human race on the precipice of making an intellectual leap of profound significance because of this massive collection effort?''