so please welcome viktor mayer-schonberger and kenneth cukier. [applause] >> thank you very much. it's a pleasure to be here. welcome. "big data" is going to change how we live, work and think. and our journey begins with a story. the story begins with the flu. every year the winter flu kills tens of thousands of people around the world. but in 2009 a new virus was discovered, and experts fear it might kill tens of millions. there was no vaccine available to the best health authorities could do was to slow its spread, but to do that they needed to know where it was. in the u.s. the centers for disease control have doctors report cases, but collecting the data and analyzing it takes time. so the cdc's pictures of the crisis was always a week or two behind. which is an eternity when a pandemic is under way. around the same time engineers at google develop an alternative way to predict the spread of the flu, not just nationally but down to regions in the united states. they use google searches. google handles more than 3 billion searches a day and saves them all. google took 50 milli

kenneth cukier is data editor of "the economist," and viktor mayer-schonburg is a professor at oxford'sether they are authors of "big data: a revolution that will transform how we live, work, and think." welcome. what's the big story here? we've always had data. why is big data a quantum leap? >> first, we have vastly more data than we ever had before. that's new. secondly, we have more data on things we never had rendered into a data format before. it was always informational, but not data. so you can take where you are, location, as one example. words in books that are now digitized and also datafied. when you think about social media platforms like facebook, it datafies ours relationships. >> you have a new example about the flu. which i thought was fascinating. where you talk about how google and big data allowed you to actually figure out -- allowed people to figure out where flus were breaking. >> yes, indeed. think back at the h1n1 flu crisis we had and the centers for disease control in atlanta and the united states wanted to find out where the flu was and they asked doctors to