Live from the IBM Information on Demand Conference in Las Vegas, John Furrier and Dave Vellante, theCUBE co-hosts, interviewed Jake Porway , Founder & Executive Director at DataKind. Talking about this event and his presentation on stage, Porway described his keynote as “mostly talking about new ways that we can use big data for the greater good.”

Elaborating on that, he added: “There are a lot of great applications around, businesses are figuring out how to help you watch movies better, or to find a bar that you might want to go to, but the coolest thing to me about the big in Big Data is that it’s expansive. It no longer touches just Wall Street and Silicon Valley or the places you traditionally see data; you’re seeing it now wherever everyone’s having their data moment. So there’s always great new opportunities to use new data sources to solve really big problems.”

Porway took the stage at this Conference to speak about his non-profit DataKind, and the way they’ve been using data science to tackle some of the biggest issues in the world through collaborations.

The social media movement

“How do you harness people’s fleeting moment of ‘do good’? What’s your approach?” asked Furrier.

“One of the things that’s really nice about this is that the communities are already doing a lot of this themselves (people taking part in Kaggle competitions and going to hackathons). What we were missing there was the connection to the real world problems. If you leave an excited data scientist on his own to solve a problem, he’s going to solve his own problem – which is usually parking his car, or finding a bar to drink at. The trick that we worked on was actually less about data and more about translation, about finding a way for data scientists to speak the language of the people who were trying to solve the big problems,” explained Porway.

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Furrier agreed and added that “the best data scientist is the one that’s invisible.” At the end of the day the customers just want to get from point A to point B. “How do you enable that?”

“I thought the biggest thing we’d be dealing was data related, that we were going to bring all these data scientists in, but frankly the biggest aspect is actually the framing of the problem: really finding the question. As any good data scientist will tell you, it’s not so much about the data, it’s the question you start with.”

Porway relayed that a lot of time is spent bringing data scientist to sit down with organizations and really understand what they need.

Vellante took the time to mention another great data scientist, Jeff Hammerbacher, famous – among other things – for the quote “The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads,” asking Porway if he shared his negativity regarding the ad-clicking business.

“It’s a very important tool to have and business is a very important aspect,” commented Porway. “I don’t like people who go one side or another, who vilify business.”

Creative big data

“The problem with Big Data is creativity,” added Furrier. “Creativity is really the power.”

Porway agreed: “That’s one thing you keep hearing about data scientists; they have to be creative, they have to think outside the box, and that’s a hard thing to do, especially that right now Big Data is treated like a mystery.”

“What do you think of Social Data as a potential to drive predictions?” asked Vellante.

“It’s almost immeasurable,” commented Porway. “It’s data about us, it’s the digital representation of almost everything we do. The potential for prediction is huge.”

“Where are we with the social good market right now?” asked Furrier.

“I hope we get past this point of seeing a division between social good and industry. Everyone is going to reach this greater level of data literacy, and I would love to see the community talking about it more.”