Can we predict what the next hub of tech entrepreneurship will be? Could we pinpoint where the next real estate boom will be and invest there? Thanks to advances in machine learning and easier access to public data through Open Data initiatives, we can now explore these types of questions.
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Fifteen years ago, I had the unique opportunity to go on Semester at Sea, an around-the-world trip on a converted cruise ship that combined college coursework stops at nine countries on four continents. This once in a lifetime trip instilled in me a strong sense of wanderlust and a deep desire to give back to the global community.
Fast-forward to a few months ago, when I joined Exaptive on an exciting new project. A large NGO enlisted us to analyze a massive set of historical data for countries. The goal: to develop a better, more granular means of grouping countries than the outdated and crude approach of "developed" and "developing." This large, complex, messy dataset and thorny problem were a great fit for my background in artificial intelligence and data science.
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The ability to reuse and repurpose - exaptation - is often a catalyst for exciting breakthroughs. The Astronomical Medicine Project (yes, astronomical medicine) was founded on the realization that space phenomena could be visualized using MRI software, like highly irregular brains. The first private space plane, designed by Burt Ratan, reenters the atmosphere using wings inspired by a badminton birdie. Anecdotes like this abound in many fields, and the principle applies to working with data and creating data applications, as much as it does any innovation.
To demonstrate and give our users a running start at successfully repurposing something, we want to share an editable data application, the Taco Cuisine Genome Atlas. We held an internal hackathon in which teams had a day to design and build a xap. (A xap is what we call data application built with our platform. Learn a bit more about our dataflow programming environment here.) One team took algorithms and visualizations created for a cancer research application and applied them to tacos. Application users can identify, according to multiple ingredients, specific tacos and where to find them.
The best part is that this wasn't entirely an act of frivolity. Repurposing healthcare and life sciences tools on different, albeit mundane, data led to a potential improvement for the cancer research application - a map visualization of clinical trials for specific cancer types.
It can't be said enough. New perspective is a key catalyst for innovation.
So, we've made this xap available for the public to kickstart other work. Explore it, build off it, and apply it to your own data.
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