CSCE 181 Guest Lecture 5

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A brief History of Information

3rd Century BC

In the library of Alexandria there was about 500,000 volumes all cataloged and classified, but you had to know what you're looking for and ask for it.

1247

Invention of the inverted list data structure: first concordance of the Bible (large index of every word)

Semi-Modern

Public libraries with browsable information

1945

Hyperlinks - organizing information by relation to subjects

Modern-day

Computers
made portable
Sneakernet - put on your sneakers and literally move the file on an external medium
Internet and Web

Information is now easier to get out than in the past:

Every two days now we create as much inofrmation as we did from the dawn of civilization up until 2003, according to Google's Eric Schmidt. That's something like five exabytes of data, he says. [TechCrunch]

We have access to BIG computing resources

Big Data + Big Computation
?
Profit

Community to Crowd

Community:

Membership is static and long-lived
explicitly declared

Crowd:

Pop up after a need
Naturally organized
Fade away

How do they form? Why? Where are they distributed across space?

Infolab

http://infolab.tamu.edu Take advantage of huge amount of information

Three steps to Success

Go to talks: SXSW, TED (talks about everything!)
Own your education: Learn Python, iPhone Development
WRITE, Write, write blog, text, with a critic is better