Big Data and Biomedical Research: Developments and Implications

Richard Gleave, Public Health England and Professor Sue Dopson, Said Business School give a talk for the Green Templeton Lectures 2017: Delivering Health: Clinical, Management and Policy Challenges. The challenges presented when attempting to get research evidence into medical practice are notorious and, because of this, there exists a healthcare gap which warrants discussion. The relationship between the professions, management and government inevitably leads to one important question: 'who is accountable for quality improvement?' This lecture explored the term 'accountability' in relation to evidence based healthcare, and outlined the difficulties faced when attempting to implement research in both policy and medicine. For those of you weren't able to make it to this instalment of the Green Templeton Lectures, we have provided a full summary of the talk (PDF).

Professor Sir John Bell, Regius Professor of Medicine, University of Oxford, gives a talk for the Green Templeton College 2016 lecture series on big data and biomedical research.

Professor Tim Lang, Professor of Food Policy, City University London gives a talk on significance of the emergence of big data in the world of food. Collation of data has long been a feature of the food system, but big data does signal a new round in the long tussle between food capital, the state and food democracy. The technical shift in big data creates new opportunities for the transfer of food power between consumers, government and commerce. Public policy is not currently helping the democratisation of these opportunities, despite rhetoric of consumer sovereignty. A new food citizenship is elusive. This lecture proposed that the 21st century food challenge is no longer a matter of plentiful supply of cheap affordable foods, as the productionists conceived it in the mid 20th century. Big food data reminds us that the battle for food control is both about information and minds not just nutrients, bodies and ecosystems. And it is still about which policy direction to follow. Big data does not reduce the options but does add urgency.

Professor Helen Margetts, Director of the Oxford Internet Institute and Professor of Society and the Internet, University of Oxford gives a talk on social media and how it can shape collective action. The internet and social media bring political change, allowing 'tiny acts' of political participation which can scale up to large-scale mobilisation of millions - but mostly fail. These new forms of mobilisation increase instability and uncertainty in political systems, challenging policy-makers in both democratic and authoritarian regimes. But they also generate new sources of large-scale data. Drawing on research carried out for the new book Political Turbulence: How Social Media Shape Collective Action (Margetts, John, Hale and Yasseri, 2015, Princeton University Press), this lecture discussed how social media is changing political systems - and how data science tools and methodologies might be used to understand, explain and even predict the new 'political turbulence'.

Professor Susan Halford, Director Web Science Institute, University of Southampton, gives a talk on using social social media for research. The phenomenal growth of Web-based social media data provokes great interest and activity from researchers across a range of disciplines. For most, if not all, the lure of these data is that they offer important insights into the social world: digital traces of the things that people say and do in everyday life, at scale, in real time and over time. However, in the emergent field of social media analysis the challenges of working with these data are becoming increasingly apparent. This lecture outlined the disciplinary, methodological and ethical challenges of working with social media data and explored some of the routes through which these might be addressed

Professor Avinash Dixit, the Sanjaya Lall Visiting Professor 2016, leads a panel discussion reviewing and explaining the rapid growth of emerging market multinationals over the last three decades.

Professor Nicholas John White, Professor of Tropical Medicine, University of Oxford and Mahidol University, Physician, John Radcliffe Hospital gives the Archie Cochrane 2015 lecture. Malaria is the most important parasitic infection of humans. No other infectious disease has had left such an imprint on the human genome. In tropical regions approximately 2000 people, mainly children in Africa, die each day from malaria. Medicines for malaria have been used for thousands of years and indeed due to active measures such as marsh draining and the development of residual insecticides, malaria was reduced substantially or eliminated in many areas, but in others (much of sub-Saharan Africa) there was little impact. However the future is uncertain. Resistance to the main insecticides is rising jeopardising the efficacy of treated bed nets and resistance to the main drugs has emerged in South East Asia and is spreading.

Professor Abhijit Banerjee (Sanjaya Lall Visiting Professor) delivers the 2015 Sajaya Lall Lecture. Professor Abhijit Banerjee, Ford International Professor of Economics at MIT, will be joining the Department of Economics as the Sanjaya Lall Visiting Professor for Trinity Term 2015. Professor Banerjee is a founding director of the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) and in 2011, he was named one of Foreign Policy magazine's top 100 global thinkers. His areas of research are development economics and economic theory. He is the author of a large number of articles and three books, including Poor Economics (www.pooreconomics.com) which won the Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year in 2011.

Fourth lecture in the Green Templeton College lecture 2015. This lecture focusses on the changing literary world of the child and the place of literature in the lives of today's children. The purpose is to consider developments in children's literature in their own right, to identify and critique depictions of children in literature and to relate developments in children's literature to the changing nature of children's lives. Consideration will be given to the child's world as depicted both in key books and literary characters.

Third lecture in the Green Templeton Colege 2015 lecture series. This lecture will look at developments relating to childhood, viewed in a global perspective. The discussion will focus on how processes associated with globalisation - viewed broadly to include political, social and cultural factors as well as economic processes - are acting to influence and affect childhoods. Inequalities in children's life chances are among the topics to be considered. The lecture will consider these and other topics from an international comparative perspective and with particular regard to how developments are serving to change the lives and futures of children.