Landmark Ideas Series

In an age where technology appears to rule supreme, it is easy to forget that our relationship with technology is complicated. Just as humans shape technology, it shapes us in return. It is also easy to only see things through the lens of the technologies we have to hand, and build solutions that ill fit reality. Electronic health records for example demand that clinical work bends to the needs of documentation, with the end result being burnt out clinicians who do anything but what they were taught at medical school.

Privacy has become a central focus of policy debates in every context. In this talk, Lessig argues that we’re conceiving of the problem in a fundamentally flawed way. Offered is a different framework, radically different but critically better. Or so it is hoped.

There is an urgent need to take what we have learned in our new data-driven era of medicine, and use it to create a new system of precision medicine, delivering the best, safest, cost-effective preventative or therapeutic intervention at the right time, for the right patients.  Dr. Butte's lab at the University of California, San Francisco builds and applies tools that convert trillions of points of molecular, clinical, and epidemiological data -- measured by researchers and clinicians over the past decade and now commonly termed “big data” -- into diagnostics, therapeutics, and new insight

Genome sequencing is revolutionizing the diagnosis of rare diseases, but 95% of these conditions still lack effective therapy. With up to 7,000 distinct genetic diseases to tackle, new and creative frameworks will be necessary to meet this need. Recent advances offer the prospect of platform-based therapeutic approaches to certain genetically targetable disorders — in the right circumstances, facilitating the design and deployment of hyper-personalized drugs for conditions affecting as few as even a single patient.

What can medicine learn about collaboration and data sharing from one of the most successful team science projects of all time--creating a telescope the diameter of the earth to snap an image of a black hole? Black holes are cosmic objects so massive and dense that their gravity forms an event horizon: a region of spacetime from which nothing, not even light, can escape. Einstein's theories predict that a distant observer should see a ring of light encircling the black hole, which forms when radiation emitted by infalling hot gas is lensed by the extreme gravity.

Healthcare has been slow to adopt scalable, interoperable, user-centric solutions as other industries have done, but technology is finally catching up with the needs of patients. Ricky will share how Apple's support and use of open standards has helped accelerate adoption across the country.

In the early days of the Internet, technical innovation shaped its future. Today, issues of economics, market dynamics, incentives, and some fundamental aspects of networked systems shape the future. This talk will summarize eleven forces that are shaping the future of the Internet and make an argument that we are at a point of inflection in the character of the Internet, as profound as the change in the 1990’s when the Internet was commercialized.

Human beings choose their friends, and often their neighbors and co-workers, and they inherit their relatives; and each of the people to whom we are connected also does the same, such that, in the end, we humans assemble ourselves into face-to-face social networks. Why do we do this? How has natural selection shaped us in this regard? What role do our genes play in the topology of our social ties? And how might a deep understanding of human social network structure and function be used to intervene in the world to make it better?