Development Policy Seminar on emerging challenges and opportunities for data scientists, with Professor Xiao-Li Meng of Harvard University

The Development Research Branch (DRB) organized a seminar on emerging opportunities and challenges for data scientists in using big data. Prof. Xiao-Li Meng of Harvard University, founding editor-in-chief of Harvard Data Science Review, spoke about the trade-offs data scientists face in dealing with the expanding universe of data. He explained the false security that researchers might have when possessing an enormous amount of data, and emphasized it is futile to try to compensate subpar data quality with quantity. He illustrated with recent empirical evidence how little information a very large amount of data actually provides if the data is not truly representative. He also discussed trade-off between protecting data privacy and allowing researchers to extract useful information from dataset that consists of personal data – a difficult decision that needs to be made by experts and stakeholders in many different fields. The well-attended seminar was moderated by Senior Economic Affairs Officer Nazrul Islam.