The Institute Of World Politics

This lecture occurred at The Institute of World Politics on February 7, 2017. This lecture was given by Mr. Dan Evans of Storm King Analytics. The excitement about "Big Data" usually focuses on the access to lots of data -- thousands, or millions, of records. "Big Data" sources are certainly valuable in many situations, but we can cite numerous examples where it doesn't produce insights that are useful. Our experience tells us that simply pulling in large amounts of data usually doesn't answer the question at hand. There's a fine art to collecting the appropriate data sets to make effective decisions; it requires a combination of both smarts and wisdom--something we call "Smart Data." Storm King's recent work has focused on network models of Ungoverned Spaces and business intelligence in Frontier and Emerging Markets. Traditional "Big Data" sources tend to be incomplete and inaccurate when it comes to these environments and they don't begin to capture the type of data required to understand the networks of