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