Dr. Suzie Allard offers a researcher's viewpoint on Big Data: A Revolution That Will Transform How We Live, Work, and Think by Viktor Mayer-Schönberger. Whether it is used by the National Security Agency to fight terrorism or by online retailers to predict customers’ buying patterns, big data is a revolution occurring around us, in the process of forever changing economics, science, culture, and the very way we think. But it also poses new threats, from the end of privacy as we know it to the prospect of being penalized for things we haven’t even done yet, based on big data’s ability to predict our future behavior.

Dr. Allard is Associate Dean for Research at the University of Tennessee College of Communication and Information where she researches how scientists and engineers use and communicate information, with a focus on scientific data.