Data for good: Wonderful ways data is making the world better

Corporate citizenship has long been a community-stabilizing power. For decades, businesses have steadied struggling neighborhoods and schools, stocked shelves in food banks, funded shelters, rectified social inequalities, protected the environment and animals, and sought cures for what ails mankind. Today, corporate social responsibility (CSR) is aiming to provide more social good on a much larger scale--and big data and related technologies are the technical means they are using to reach that goal. "Digital-age technologies like blockchain, IoT, AI, and big data analytics are aiding corporate social responsibility practitioners to develop a sustainable and resilient world," says Kevin S. Parikh, author of "Digital Singularity: A Case for Humanity" and CEO of Avasant, a global management consulting firm. "Large-scale data collection combined with machine learning offers a new set of tools that opens up new avenues of research and greatly enhances the efficiency and efficacy of CSR work," Parikh adds.