- The Case Of Big Data
- Quantifying Everything About Urban Life
- Press News | Ethics Working Group
- NPR: Can Big Data Resolve The Human Condition?
- Kavli HUMAN Project Preliminary Study Design
- HUMAN: Human Understanding through Measurement and ANalysis
- New York Magazine's Science of Us
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Kavli HUMAN Project - Vox highlights the Kavli HUMAN Project
The Kavli HUMAN Project will be the first true study of all of the factors that make humans… human. For the first time ever we are now able to quantify the human condition using rigorous science and big data approaches to understand what makes us well and what makes us ill by measuring the feedback mechanisms between biology, behavior, and our environment in the bio-behavioral complex.
The bio-behavioral complex comprises the feedback effects between biology, behavior, and the environment, and how these forces shape our lives, society, and overall wellbeing.
Until now, large-scale longitudinal studies have been focused on specific domains of inquiry or subsets of the population. As a result, existing large-scale datasets have provided detailed catalogs of narrow aspects of human health and behavior, such as cardiovascular health, financial decision making, or genetic sequencing. Mining this uncharted territory for revolutionary insights into human health and behavior requires radical new measurements of the human condition that have been previously unattainable. Taking advantage of the Big Data revolution, the Kavli HUMAN Project will enable—for the first time—the mapping out and understanding of the bio-behavioral complex.
Take Control of Your Data
You already shed data through time and space all day long, collected by the corporations that track your spending, location, and use of technology. We at the Kavli HUMAN Project believe that the people’s data can be better used to serve them, their communities, and society.
What Will We Do?
We will study the lives of 10,000 New York City residents in approximately 4,000 households over the span of decades by collecting measurements across multiple domains and disciplines, and provide this massive, interdisciplinary, and secure dataset to the research community to achieve previously unattainable groundbreaking advancements in medicine, the social sciences, and understanding the true nature of human behavior, while fostering evidenced-based public policies.
Why Now?
Thanks to advances in technology, such as wearables and microsensors, and maturation of multiple disciplines—including neuroscience, psychology, genetics, economics, and urban informatics—we now have the tools and knowledge necessary to create a long-term living portrait of how humans truly behave in a large urban environment.
Benefits
The Kavli HUMAN Project will provide a novel view of the human condition with unprecedented breadth and depth. Analysis of individual differences at such a large scale will provide new theories and understandings of the truly complex bio-behavioral mechanisms underlying human health and behavior, as well as new therapeutics. Providing the research community writ large with a large dataset containing many different types of measurements allows them to conduct the kind of interdisciplinary research that would be nearly impossible to do in smaller-scale, one-off studies. This research will also allow the public, academics, and policymakers to learn what policies work or don’t work, and how to improve them.