The BYTE project aims to: 1) Produce a big data roadmap and recommendations for European stakeholders. 2) Involve relevant actors to identify problems and create a big data community. 3) Disseminate findings to encourage roadmap implementation and community participation. One case study examines crisis informatics, finding that big data is beginning to improve situational awareness but focusing mainly on social media and geography. Validating data quality through "human computing" is innovative. Privacy and data protection challenges remain significant given the focus on social media data.

1. BYTE:
Big Data and Crisis Informatics – a BYTE Case Study
Kush Wadhwa
Trilateral Research & Consulting, LLP
BYTE project coordinator
Big data roadmap and cross-disciplinarY
community for addressing socieTal
Externalities
ISCRAM Conference
(EU project symposium proceedings)
27 May 2015

2. @BYTE_EU www.byte-project.eu
Objectives
The BYTE project has three main objectives:
1. To produce a research and policy roadmap and recommendations to support European stakeholders in
increasing their share of the big data market by 2020 and in capturing and addressing the positive and
negative societal externalities associated with use of big data.
2. To involve all of the European actors relevant to big data in order to identify concrete current and
emerging problems to be addressed in the BYTE roadmap. The stakeholder engagement activities will lead to
the creation of the big data community, a sustainable platform from which to measure progress in meeting the
challenges posed by societal externalities and identify new and emerging challenges.
3. To disseminate the BYTE findings, recommendations and the existence of the BYTE big data community to
a larger population of stakeholders in order to encourage them to implement the BYTE guidelines and
participate in the big data community.

3. @BYTE_EU www.byte-project.eu
Project details: BYTE
•Big data roadmap and cross-disciplinarY community for addressing socieTal Externalities (BYTE)
project
•March 2014 – Feb 2017; 36 months
• Funded by DG-CNCT: €2.25 million (Grant agreement no: 619551)
• 11 Partners
• 10 Countries

4. @BYTE_EU www.byte-project.eu
Case studies: big data practitioners
Environmental data
Energy
Utilities / Smart Cities
Cultural Data
Health
Crisis informatics
Transport

5. @BYTE_EU www.byte-project.eu
BYTE project key outputs
•Define research efforts and policy measures necessary for responsible participation in
the big data economy
•Vision for Big Data for Europe for 2020, incorporating externalities
• Amplify positive externalities
• Diminish negative ones
•Roadmap
• Research Roadmap
• Policy Roadmap
•Formation of a Big Data community
• Implement the roadmap
• Sustainability plan

6. BYTE Crisis
informatics
case study
The BYTE team will work with the Research Institute for Crisis Computing to examine:
o The role of big data in crisis informatics and crisis response activities
o Externalities associated with the use of big data to identify and respond to crises
Examples of Externalities Positive Negative
Economic • Boost to the economy
• Innovation
• Increase efficiency
• Smaller actors left behind
• Shrink economies
New business models with social
and economic considerations, and
increased innovation through open
data and source material and by
infrastructure and technology
improvements
Private companies gaining revenue
from organisations that can least
afford to pay a premium
Legal • Privacy
• Data protection
• Data ownership
• Copyright
• Risks associated with inclusion & exclusion
Organisations implementing
measures to support data
protection, data security and other
legal issues
Access to proprietary data
restricted outside of crisis situations
Social &
ethical
• Transparency
• Discrimination
• Methodological difficulties
• Spurious relationships
• Consumer manipulation
Improved humanitarian services
and increased awareness of the
need for socially responsible and
ethical data practices
Continued issues raised by the use
of social media (privacy,
information sharing, etc.)
Political • Reliance on US services
• Services have become utilities
• Legal issues become trade issues
International cooperation Cross national flows of data
Tensions between for-profit and
non-profit organisations

7. @BYTE_EU www.byte-project.eu
Key findings from the big crisis data case
study
•Crisis informatics is in the early stages of integrating big data into standard operations
•The key improvement is that the analysis of this data improves situational awareness more quickly after an
event has occurred.
•Primarily focused on integrating social media and geographical data. There has not yet been much
progress integrating other data types – e.g., environmental measurements, meteorological data, etc.
•A key innovation is the use of human computing, primarily through digital volunteers, to validate the data
collected and determine how trustworthy it is.
•Stakeholders in this area are making progress in addressing privacy and data protection issues, which are
significant and complex, given their focus on data from social media sources.

8. @BYTE_EU www.byte-project.eu
THANK YOU
Any questions?
Key contacts:
◦ Rachel Finn – rachel.finn@trilateralresearch.com
◦ Kush Wadhwa – kush.wadhwa@trilateralresearch.com
◦ Hayley Watson – hayley.watson@trilateralresearch.com