Two things lurk deep at the heart of the digital love story. It’s not “me” and “you.” It’s “0” and “1.”
The analytics that are helping people find a better match are just one place where science informs contemporary life. Big Data may be unromantic, but it’s powerful and efficient. It’s helping wannabe lovers as well as scientists to find new meanings and hidden patterns in piles of data and build better robots, decode the brain, and, yes, avoid a bad first date.
Top GIF: A robot running on a treadmill at 28mph at DARPA. Above: A robot navigating a DARPA obstacle course. Image credit: Vice
The eye, for example, can distinguish 10 million colors, including hues like pink, which do not correspond to any actual wavelength of light. (There’s even a spirited debate whether pink exists at all.) But scientist are now using high-tech eyes in combination with big data to expand human sight and perception.
Vicehas recently teamed up with GE to go behind the scenes and find out how the marriage between analytics and innovation works. The project is called Invention Factory, and each video episode will provide a glimpse of things to come.
The series will have nine episodes covering the brain, aviation, vision and other areas. Five of them will be in English, two in Chinese and two in Portuguese. The first three in English are live now.