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Thanks very much for the invitation.

What I'm going to try and do is glue bits together from a couple of different talks

and talk about Big Data and Smart Urbanism, but also what Big Data means for the academy a bit more broadly

and what it means for cities.

So for those of you who are not familiar with the Big Data idea,

this is my attempt at trying to characterise what Big Data is.

So Big Data is very large in volume. It tries to be exhaustive, so it tries to capture all the data within a domain.

So you're not necessarily looking at samples, you're taking whole populations.

You don't need to look at a sample of tweets, you can look at the entire collection of tweets within Twitter and so on.

It's trying to get as fine-grained in resolution as it can, so not big aggregations, but right down into individuals

and try to be indexical, so unique identifiers that links to individual objects.

So it's not like every bottle of shampoo has the same barcode, it's every bottle of shampoo has a unique ARFID chip on it.

We can track and trace individual bottles, not whole cargos.

It tries to be relational, so it tries to link together different datasets, and it's fast, so it's a large volume of data quickly.

It's continuous data, it's a continuous flow, it's not periodic times.

It's quite varied in its constitution, it's not just structured data, it's also unstructured data and lots of it.

And it tends to be flexible and scalable. So what that means is you can change the research design as you go along,

you can alter the algorithm, you can alter how things are collected and sampled and so on.

So I guess one way of characterising this is some people would say, well we've had big data in the past, the census was big data.

To a certain degree it has volume and it tries to be exhaustive and it tries to have resolution.

It has no velocity, it's once every 10 years, so there's no velocity there.

It has no variety, it's 30 structured questions and there's no flexibility.

Once those questions are set you can't alter them, you can't alter midway through a census what your questions are

or start to fiddle around with the design, it's set in stone.

So it's small data in the sense, it's very big small data, but it's small data, it doesn't have the characteristic.

To contrast that with something like Facebook, for example, where you're getting 300 million photo uploads per day,

you're getting over a billion likes being clicked, you're getting a couple of billion of comments being written,

and you're having that continuously or some large supermarket chain who's collecting all its data through its checkout tills.

There's a continuous flow of lots and lots of things.

So Walmart is processing a million customer transactions an hour, huge volumes of data going through,

completely different kind of scale and speed to something like the census and old forms of knowledge.

What that means in an urban context is we're starting to get new forms of data about what's happening within cities,

but also across other kinds of domains.

And I've kind of classified them into three groups.

So we still have directed data, so there's somebody still in charge of pointing the camera and directing what is being surveyed,

what is being digitized, what's being generated.

So we're going to get millions of documents and films and audio recordings together and so on.

But we also have new kinds of automated forms of data collection.

So these are forms of automated surveillance.

These are your digital devices and so on.

So this digital device, this iPhone, for example, is collecting lots of data about me at the minute.

It knows where I am.

The apps on it are pinging back data to the service providers and so on.

It's leaving a continuous trail in behind it.

We have census and scan data, so we have various sensors across the town that might be measuring sound

or pollution and so on, or scan data, so scanning across the checkout tail and so on.

So barcodes and all those kinds of things.

Interaction and transactional data, so every kind of email or bank transfer, they're all uniquely identified.

They're all tracked and traced.