DAVID LOVES BELINDA VI
Oct 21 2010
Susan was in a snit. She marched into her kitchen, her Jimmy Choo’s announcing her arrival before t...
5 Courses with Patricia Yeo of Moksa
Jan 30 2012
It was in fall 2009 when Patricia Yeo, a New York-based chef
with a storied career and secure nation...
Managing the Data Avalanche
Oct 9 2010
Frank Moss, Director of the world-renowned Media L...
Managing the Data Avalanche: Frank Moss
Could you give a very brief history of IT in the human world? If you had to pick a starting point for IT, where would you start?
MOSS: You could trace IT back to anything that’s been used by people to manage information. But the modern IT era really began in the 1930s and ’40s with the US Census, when the United States realized it needed to understand how populations in the newer states were evolving so that they could better create policy. Up until that point, there wasn’t an accurate way of tabulating the numbers. Some enterprising business people from the company that preceded IBM came across research at the University of Pennsylvania. It was called ENIAC and was developed by early IT pioneers, including John von Neumann, who were thinking about how information could be managed by digital technology. IT was truly born when Thomas Watson and others from IBM realized that the academic research on ENIAC could have a commercial application and sold the early technology to the US government for the census. After the Second World War, IBM looked at how the early computers could be used to automate some of the back-office functions of companies. The second era of IT hit when companies began to use IT to keep track of inventories and sales and so forth. The next big breakthrough came when IBM introduced the 360 computer in 1960, one that could be programmed by mere mortals. Until then, computers were available only to the high priest. That kicked off a succession of commercial advances in computing that brings us to today. IT became ever more affordable, ever cheaper, ever easier to use. IT found its way into hospitals, which were using IT not just to keep records, but also to run equipment.
And the future of IT?
MOSS: IT today is just a sophisticated tool that enables us to do things that we were doing before, but in a more effective and more convenient way. The big change that has to occur before technology and IT will be game changers is for IT to become more like a helpful partner.
What do you mean by “a helpful partner”?
MOSS: At the Media Lab we call it “common sense computing.” For example, if you present a computer with a chair, it really doesn’t know that a chair is for sitting. This is common sense – the common sense that a six-year-old has. Let me give you another element of common sense: If your cell phone goes off in a movie, that’s embarrassing. Any six-year-old knows that, but computers don’t know that. A movement began here at the Media Lab to actually collect common sense data from throughout the world. There are more than a million elements. It’s called “Open Mind.” Today’s computers can calculate trajectories to the moon, they can decode the genome...
...but they don’t have context.
MOSS: Right. They don’t know or understand everyday life. And if you could give computers that knowledge, they’d be a hell of a lot more considerate and fit more into your everyday life. One IT research goal at the Media Lab is to see if we can duplicate the common sense of a six-year-old. And then a 12-year-old, or whatever, and make that common sense available to computers when they interact with you.
How does your work at the Media Lab fit in to the future of IT?
MOSS: IT has changed the way in which we view how we relate to one another and how we communicate, how we search now, how we shop for things, how we do everything. One of the things that struck me when I first came to the Media Lab was the fact that IT hadn’t yet revolutionized some of the most mission-critical aspects of our lives.
Such as?
MOSS: Our health and our finances.
How do you distinguish between something in IT that is gee-whiz cool, versus a breakthrough?
MOSS: You try it on people. Let me give you an example of health problem with a promising but not yet proven IT technology: Obesity. Weight control. If we could somehow fix that, it would have a broad impact on people’s health and on the cost of healthcare. How do you persuade people to stay on a diet? There have been a million computer-based diets.
At least. And none of them work.
MOSS: Because weight loss is a behavioral issue, not an IT issue, most people need a coach to get them to lose weight, but few can afford it. A student in our Personal Robotics Group had an idea for a “sociable robot” that could act as a weight loss coach. Professor Cynthia Brezeal at the Media Lab is one of the world leaders in sociable robots. She builds “furry” robots that live among people and work with them, as opposed to robots that assemble cars or move products in a factory or go underwater 5,000 feet to plug an oil leak. Her robots don’t have arms. They don’t roll around. The have a face that looks at you, machine vision in the eyes. They can see you, hear you, and talk to you. Her question was: Can we teach robots like we teach young children? She built on the work of child psychology and how kids learn and designed a robot that would create the kind of social connection that would make somebody want to teach a robot something. A graduate student in her group applied it to dieting.
We did a pilot study and put the robot in 20 homes here in Boston, and compared weight loss results to the same program running on a laptop to see how long people kept on their diet. The results were very encouraging: four times as long. When we went to take it out of their homes at the conclusion of the study, people had anthropomorphized the robot, integrated it into their family life. One woman got very disturbed when they went to take it out, because she developed a relationship with the robot. That’s a fair example of what I mean by IT becoming a helpful human partner.
Why wasn’t the healthcare industry ahead of the curve?
MOSS: IT has really changed medicine. Look at imaging, for example. None of those things would have been possible if it weren’t for information technology. But I think the problem with healthcare is that, unlike other areas, it still hews to the age-old asymmetry between the high priest and ordinary people.
The high priest?
MOSS: The model of the doctor as god, owning the information – and more importantly, having sole knowledge of how to interpret and how to use the information – is still persistent today. Until that model of information asymmetry changes, I don’t believe that we’re going to solve the healthcare crisis. At the Media Lab, we are looking at how technology can eviscerate or eliminate this information asymmetry between ordinary people and medical professionals. Ordinary people have been given power to do a lot of things today. They communicate. They connect. They are citizen journalists. People drove that change. But it’s much harder to drive change in medicine.
Why is that?
MOSS: When someone has a medical problem, or suspects that their kid is sick, or when they’re looking at how to take care of their parents, they go on the Internet. We as individuals are collecting a huge amount of information about ourselves. No one knows more about how I think or feel that I do myself. Right? But that’s very disjoined from the medical world. This gap between the high priest – the professionals, the physicians, the medical researchers, the clinical researchers, the public health people – and ordinary people is growing rather than narrowing. I doubt that our challenges in healthcare, with costs zooming relative to the gross national product, are going to change until we find a way of recognizing the fact that individuals and patients are the most underutilized resource in the healthcare system.
What do you mean, underutilized?
MOSS: Doctors and patients have to work together to educate patients on how to understand the meaning of their health information. That’s the only thing I think is going to scale the system. If doctors continue to have hegemony over the medical information, and patients continue to be subservient, you’re never going to get anywhere. We are working on a project exploring how to bring ordinary people – patients – to the same level as doctors, and really change their interaction around all this medical data. How would it occur in the doctor’s office? How does it occur at home? At the Media Lab, we are doing many things that may not seem directly related to IT or healthcare but will greatly impact the future and practice of healthcare.
Let me give an example. You’ll have a mirror in your bathroom. When you’re putting on your makeup, or shaving in the morning, and you’re looking into the mirror, there will be a camera behind it that images your face and tracks the very subtle difference in – believe it or not – the shape and the color of your face, to determine your heartbeat and your blood pressure. We will have wearable devices that will register our stress level, and other things that could be part of your everyday life that would create the information about you necessary to better understand your health.
What would I do with all that information?
MOSS: That’s where the gap exists now.So, there’s all this information being collected. People in the healthcare industry have given much attention to the question of electronic medical records. The problem is that by the time they figure out the answer, it will be obsolete. Electronic medical records are basically taking the core information that physicians use to keep track off paper and putting it onto the computer.
IT has literally transformed so many aspects of our lives, but it hasn’t impacted healthcare substantially. Putting data management software into hospitals helps you maintain the flow of information through electronic medical records. But in terms of really getting down to what people do and revolutionizing or catalyzing a revolution in healthcare from the bottom up, it hasn’t happened yet. The purpose of the New Media Medicine group at the Media Lab was to do explorations and projects that would not necessarily solve the problem, but would be so radical that they would get people thinking differently. The doctor’s office of the future is going to be flooded with sensors and things that can actually tell you about your health.
And how will people manage that avalanche of data and adjust their behavior to it?
MOSS: You framed the question. That’s the challenge for IT. How will physicians, medical professionals, and individuals collaborate to get their arms around that data, to interpret it and enable you to make better decisions in your life about factors that relate to your health or the health of your family? It’s an exploding amount of information. Every day it gets larger. And so we’re in a dilemma, because we don’t even know how to manage the basic information we collect today. IT’s future is to make sure the doctor and the patient work together with transparency and have equal access to this information – without the proprietary idea that the doctor is the only one who can interpret it. When you leave the medical office, you’ve been educated. That’s the nub of the whole issue. We have to give patients the tools to become true partners, and doctors have to learn to trust the information that they get from their patient-partners. At the Media Lab, we’re working on IT solutions that will turn patients into citizen-scientists.
MOSS: You could trace IT back to anything that’s been used by people to manage information. But the modern IT era really began in the 1930s and ’40s with the US Census, when the United States realized it needed to understand how populations in the newer states were evolving so that they could better create policy. Up until that point, there wasn’t an accurate way of tabulating the numbers. Some enterprising business people from the company that preceded IBM came across research at the University of Pennsylvania. It was called ENIAC and was developed by early IT pioneers, including John von Neumann, who were thinking about how information could be managed by digital technology. IT was truly born when Thomas Watson and others from IBM realized that the academic research on ENIAC could have a commercial application and sold the early technology to the US government for the census. After the Second World War, IBM looked at how the early computers could be used to automate some of the back-office functions of companies. The second era of IT hit when companies began to use IT to keep track of inventories and sales and so forth. The next big breakthrough came when IBM introduced the 360 computer in 1960, one that could be programmed by mere mortals. Until then, computers were available only to the high priest. That kicked off a succession of commercial advances in computing that brings us to today. IT became ever more affordable, ever cheaper, ever easier to use. IT found its way into hospitals, which were using IT not just to keep records, but also to run equipment.
And the future of IT?
MOSS: IT today is just a sophisticated tool that enables us to do things that we were doing before, but in a more effective and more convenient way. The big change that has to occur before technology and IT will be game changers is for IT to become more like a helpful partner.
What do you mean by “a helpful partner”?
MOSS: At the Media Lab we call it “common sense computing.” For example, if you present a computer with a chair, it really doesn’t know that a chair is for sitting. This is common sense – the common sense that a six-year-old has. Let me give you another element of common sense: If your cell phone goes off in a movie, that’s embarrassing. Any six-year-old knows that, but computers don’t know that. A movement began here at the Media Lab to actually collect common sense data from throughout the world. There are more than a million elements. It’s called “Open Mind.” Today’s computers can calculate trajectories to the moon, they can decode the genome...
...but they don’t have context.
MOSS: Right. They don’t know or understand everyday life. And if you could give computers that knowledge, they’d be a hell of a lot more considerate and fit more into your everyday life. One IT research goal at the Media Lab is to see if we can duplicate the common sense of a six-year-old. And then a 12-year-old, or whatever, and make that common sense available to computers when they interact with you.
How does your work at the Media Lab fit in to the future of IT?
MOSS: IT has changed the way in which we view how we relate to one another and how we communicate, how we search now, how we shop for things, how we do everything. One of the things that struck me when I first came to the Media Lab was the fact that IT hadn’t yet revolutionized some of the most mission-critical aspects of our lives.
Such as?
MOSS: Our health and our finances.
How do you distinguish between something in IT that is gee-whiz cool, versus a breakthrough?
MOSS: You try it on people. Let me give you an example of health problem with a promising but not yet proven IT technology: Obesity. Weight control. If we could somehow fix that, it would have a broad impact on people’s health and on the cost of healthcare. How do you persuade people to stay on a diet? There have been a million computer-based diets.
At least. And none of them work.
MOSS: Because weight loss is a behavioral issue, not an IT issue, most people need a coach to get them to lose weight, but few can afford it. A student in our Personal Robotics Group had an idea for a “sociable robot” that could act as a weight loss coach. Professor Cynthia Brezeal at the Media Lab is one of the world leaders in sociable robots. She builds “furry” robots that live among people and work with them, as opposed to robots that assemble cars or move products in a factory or go underwater 5,000 feet to plug an oil leak. Her robots don’t have arms. They don’t roll around. The have a face that looks at you, machine vision in the eyes. They can see you, hear you, and talk to you. Her question was: Can we teach robots like we teach young children? She built on the work of child psychology and how kids learn and designed a robot that would create the kind of social connection that would make somebody want to teach a robot something. A graduate student in her group applied it to dieting.
We did a pilot study and put the robot in 20 homes here in Boston, and compared weight loss results to the same program running on a laptop to see how long people kept on their diet. The results were very encouraging: four times as long. When we went to take it out of their homes at the conclusion of the study, people had anthropomorphized the robot, integrated it into their family life. One woman got very disturbed when they went to take it out, because she developed a relationship with the robot. That’s a fair example of what I mean by IT becoming a helpful human partner.
Why wasn’t the healthcare industry ahead of the curve?
MOSS: IT has really changed medicine. Look at imaging, for example. None of those things would have been possible if it weren’t for information technology. But I think the problem with healthcare is that, unlike other areas, it still hews to the age-old asymmetry between the high priest and ordinary people.
The high priest?
MOSS: The model of the doctor as god, owning the information – and more importantly, having sole knowledge of how to interpret and how to use the information – is still persistent today. Until that model of information asymmetry changes, I don’t believe that we’re going to solve the healthcare crisis. At the Media Lab, we are looking at how technology can eviscerate or eliminate this information asymmetry between ordinary people and medical professionals. Ordinary people have been given power to do a lot of things today. They communicate. They connect. They are citizen journalists. People drove that change. But it’s much harder to drive change in medicine.
Why is that?
MOSS: When someone has a medical problem, or suspects that their kid is sick, or when they’re looking at how to take care of their parents, they go on the Internet. We as individuals are collecting a huge amount of information about ourselves. No one knows more about how I think or feel that I do myself. Right? But that’s very disjoined from the medical world. This gap between the high priest – the professionals, the physicians, the medical researchers, the clinical researchers, the public health people – and ordinary people is growing rather than narrowing. I doubt that our challenges in healthcare, with costs zooming relative to the gross national product, are going to change until we find a way of recognizing the fact that individuals and patients are the most underutilized resource in the healthcare system.
What do you mean, underutilized?
MOSS: Doctors and patients have to work together to educate patients on how to understand the meaning of their health information. That’s the only thing I think is going to scale the system. If doctors continue to have hegemony over the medical information, and patients continue to be subservient, you’re never going to get anywhere. We are working on a project exploring how to bring ordinary people – patients – to the same level as doctors, and really change their interaction around all this medical data. How would it occur in the doctor’s office? How does it occur at home? At the Media Lab, we are doing many things that may not seem directly related to IT or healthcare but will greatly impact the future and practice of healthcare.
Let me give an example. You’ll have a mirror in your bathroom. When you’re putting on your makeup, or shaving in the morning, and you’re looking into the mirror, there will be a camera behind it that images your face and tracks the very subtle difference in – believe it or not – the shape and the color of your face, to determine your heartbeat and your blood pressure. We will have wearable devices that will register our stress level, and other things that could be part of your everyday life that would create the information about you necessary to better understand your health.
What would I do with all that information?
MOSS: That’s where the gap exists now.So, there’s all this information being collected. People in the healthcare industry have given much attention to the question of electronic medical records. The problem is that by the time they figure out the answer, it will be obsolete. Electronic medical records are basically taking the core information that physicians use to keep track off paper and putting it onto the computer.
IT has literally transformed so many aspects of our lives, but it hasn’t impacted healthcare substantially. Putting data management software into hospitals helps you maintain the flow of information through electronic medical records. But in terms of really getting down to what people do and revolutionizing or catalyzing a revolution in healthcare from the bottom up, it hasn’t happened yet. The purpose of the New Media Medicine group at the Media Lab was to do explorations and projects that would not necessarily solve the problem, but would be so radical that they would get people thinking differently. The doctor’s office of the future is going to be flooded with sensors and things that can actually tell you about your health.
And how will people manage that avalanche of data and adjust their behavior to it?
MOSS: You framed the question. That’s the challenge for IT. How will physicians, medical professionals, and individuals collaborate to get their arms around that data, to interpret it and enable you to make better decisions in your life about factors that relate to your health or the health of your family? It’s an exploding amount of information. Every day it gets larger. And so we’re in a dilemma, because we don’t even know how to manage the basic information we collect today. IT’s future is to make sure the doctor and the patient work together with transparency and have equal access to this information – without the proprietary idea that the doctor is the only one who can interpret it. When you leave the medical office, you’ve been educated. That’s the nub of the whole issue. We have to give patients the tools to become true partners, and doctors have to learn to trust the information that they get from their patient-partners. At the Media Lab, we’re working on IT solutions that will turn patients into citizen-scientists.
food
health and wellness
Managing the Data Avalanche
Physician on a Mission
Chest Pain: Clarity with CT
Goodbye trans fats; now it's salt's turn
Diary of a Celiac
Party of 12: A Real Women's Weight-Loss Group
Whole Foods Goes Small
I Do. (Now What?)
Diet for disease-proof life
And the alternative GURU says...
When did we become our own doctors?
What's the alternative?
Revolution in the Desert
world