Code of Ethics Can Guide Responsible Data Use

There's untold opportunity in the mountains of data being amassed today but also the potential for harm, according to former U.S. Chief Data Scientist DJ Patil. Modern life has changed dramatically over the past decade, thanks in large part to new technologies and the ever-evolving business models they've enabled, but the fundamental transformative factor underlying it all is data. So contended DJ Patil, who served as the first chief data scientist for the United States, at the most recent Deloitte Analytics and AI Summit. Massive increases in computational power and storage are making it possible to collect, store, and analyze rapidly increasing volumes of data--currently some 2.5 quintillion bytes every day, by Patil's estimation--and the transformations that have resulted so far are just the beginning, he said. "We're about to go from sequencing the human genome to precision medicine. Autonomous vehicles have started to appear on our roads, and we'll soon see efforts to build self-driving cargo ships and airplanes as well."