The societal impact of big data: A research roadmap for Europe

Abstract

With its rapid growth and increasing adoption, big data is producing a substantial impact in society. Its usage is opening both opportunities such as new business models and economic gains and risks such as privacy violations and discrimination. Europe is in need of a comprehensive strategy to optimise the use of data for a societal benefit and increase the innovation and competitiveness of its productive activities. In this paper, we contribute to the definition of this strategy with a research roadmap to capture the economic, social and ethical, legal and political benefits associated with the use of big data in Europe. The present roadmap considers the positive and negative externalities associated with big data, maps research and innovation topics in the areas of data management, processing, analytics, protection, visualisation, as well as non-technical topics, to the externalities they can tackle, and provides a time frame to address these topics in order to deliver social impact, skills development and standardisation. Finally, it also identifies what sectors will be most benefited by each of the research efforts. The goal of the roadmap is to guide European research efforts to develop a socially responsible big data economy, and to allow stakeholders to identify and meet big data challenges and proceed with a shared understanding of the societal impact, positive and negative externalities and concrete problems worth investigating in future programmes. IntroductionThe volume of data is growing exponentially, and is expected to reach the tens of zettabytes in 2020, of which a third is expected to be valuable if analysed, and about 40% will require protection [1]. The acquisition, analysis, curation, storage and usage of such big data may result in effects experienced by third parties that had no direct involvement in the activity itself. These externalities-positive if the action causes a positive effect or benefit to the third party, negative if it causes cost or harm-arise from decisions, activities or products by stakeholders such as industry, researchers and policy-makers.The present document contributes to the formulation of a strategy to define research and innovation efforts necessary for the realisation of a European big data economy by capturing and addressing the positive and negative societal externalities associated with the use of big data. It complements the technical challenges already identified [2] by taking a special focus on societal impacts, skills development and standardisation, and has been developed in parallel with a policy roadmap in the context of a multi-disciplinary study of the societal impacts of big data in seven European sectors aimed to define a roadmap and create a community that address and optimise these impacts [3].The term big data has received numerous definitions [4,5]. To develop the roadmap, we considered as a working definition that big data is that which uses big volume, big velocity, big variety data assets to extract value (insight and knowledge), and furthermor...

A European research roadmap for optimizing societal impact of big data on environment and energy efficiency

“…One example of positive externality is improved decision-making for sustainable development and disaster risk management, leading to progress to more sustainability, environmental safety and reduced disaster risk. Energy efficiency benefits also showed up in other related case studies [9], especially in sectors closer to the environment one such as the oil & gas and the smart city case studies. For example, big data was found to help reduce environmental impacts by the early detections of incidents and by monitoring equipment condition [11] and to better resource efficiency through targeted services in the smart city.…”

“…Relevance has been assessed by workshop participants (from dark to lighter blue): top priority if all or almost all stakeholders agreed the topic to be of high priority; high priority if it was generally considered to be of high priority; medium priority if it was generally considered to be of medium priority; low priority otherwise. The implementation of this roadmap is expected to deliver key social benefits in the areas of decision-making, data-driven innovations and novel business models, environmental benefits, and increased citizen participation, transparency and trust [9]. Improved decision-making comes especially from the use of data analytics for large volumes of environmental data to impact legislation and policies, as well as more efficiency in resource allocation.…”

“…The roadmap is the culmination of a series of case studies, analysis, expert focus groups and workshops conducted within the BYTE project [9] that resulted in an identification of the societal impacts of big data in seven European sectors: crisis informatics [10], culture, energy [11], environment, healthcare, smart cities and transport.…”

“…In addition to these purpose layers, we also considered how this research impacts the energy efficiency and environment sector. This is part of a larger effort to include up to 18 sectorial layers [5] that represent the society pull in the roadmap. We further defined six bottom layers, also known as know-how, corresponding to the five-technical and the nontechnical research and innovation areas, or resources, that are to be addressed to meet the demands of the top layers, and that encode the technology push.…”

“…It is aligned with a broader, multisectorial research [5] and policy [6] roadmap that has resulted from the Big data roadmap for cross-disciplinarY community for addressing societal Externalities (BYTE) Project, a threeyears European project involving the research, industry and civil society community, and with the Big Data Value Strategic Research and Innovation Agenda (BDV SRIA) that defines the overall goals and technical and non-technical priorities for the European Public Private Partnership on Big Data Value [7]. A community of research, civil society organizations and industry partners, has been built around the roadmap with the purpose of implementing its recommendations and best practices and further develop and update it.…”