On 23rd of November the 6th and final webinar / hangout of the Big Data Europe SC6 team (Europe in a changing world – inclusive, innovative and reflective societies) took place with a presentation by Fernando Reis, member of the Big Data Task Force at Eurostat. Fernando gave interesting insights into the field of big data and smart data and how these new principles and technologies can be used in / applied to the domain of statistics. The title of the webinar was: From Big Data to trusted Smart Statistics.

The final webinar / hangout of SC6 team in the Big Data Europe will be together with Fernando Reis, member of the big data team of Eurostat – he will present the topic: From Big Data to Trusted Smart Statistics…

WHAT: BDE SC6 Hangout / Webinar
TITLE: From Big Data to Trusted Smart Statistics
WHO: Fernando Reis (eurostat), Ivana Versic (Cessda), Martin Kaltenböck (SWC)
WHEN: Thursday 23rd of Novem,ber 2017, 15.00pm CET
WHERE: register here

“Statistics are the mirror through which we view society” (David Hand)

This webinar will provide a reflexion on the future of Statistics in a hyper-connected world dominated by IoT and Smart Systems. It will start with a brief reminder of the implications of big data and how it is changing the way we produce statistics and use data to monitor and analyse the world around us. It will then explore how the extended use of smart systems and the IoT (Internet of Things) will eventually take big data to a whole new level and change the data landscape. Data capturing and processing for statistical and analytical purposes could be embedded in the smart systems themselves coupled with an intelligent data life-cycle enhanced with cognitive processes. We call this Smart Statistics. However, statistics are only useful when they are trusted. In order to build trust into Smart Statistics, the data life-cycle needs to be auditable, transparent, with guarantees of accuracy and assure privacy by design. Finally, we will discuss how a road towards Trusted Smart Statistics can be built.

Fernando Reis is a member of Eurostat big data task-force in charge of developing a strategy for the integration of big data in official statistics at EU level. He’s involved in the discussion of strategic issues concerning big data and statistical production, including methodology, quality, skills, ethics, communication, legislation, big data policy and IT infrastructure. He oversees pilot experiments on the use of big data sources for official statistics and conduct some studies himself, namely involving mobile phone data and web activity data.

The 3rd Big Data Europe (BDE) workshop in domain of the EU Societal Challenge 6 – Europe in a Changing World: Inclusive, Innovative and Reflective Societies (SC6) was held on 11 September 2017 in Amsterdam, The Netherlands.

The title and topic of the workshop was: The importance of Metadata & Big Data in OpenScience – where are we and where are we going to

It was organised by CESSDA ERIC and the Semantic Web Company (SWC), both beneficiaries in the BigDataEurope project, as an official workshop of the SEMANTiCS2017 conference. Around 45+ participants joined the workshop – 2/3 officially registered and 1/3 participating from the SEMANTiCS2017 audience ad-hoc by registering on-site.

The workshop offered high-quality talks by several experts in the fields of social sciences, smart statistics and open science as Ron Dekker (Director of Cessda), Peter Doorn (Director of DANS) or Fernando Reis (Big Data team Eurostat) as well as an open panel discussion with Q&A from the audience and finally a presentation of the SC6 pilot implementation on ‘Citizen Budget on Municipal Level’ and was overall a great success.