TRANSCRIPT:

So I want to do a project where we invite 10 million people in the course of a day all over the world to sign up to be human sensors. So the idea that I would know from your -- you would download an app, and there would be two things; there would be a passive and active part of it. So the passive part would be you would allow me to find out how far you travelled, how fast, how much money you spent during the day, how many emails you got, how many times you checked your email. So that would be all the passive stuff that your phone is collecting all the time.

And then, every hour, I would send you a question, and I'd say, "Who's the last person you communicated with, and how did you communicate with them? How much have you spent in the last hour? Look around you. How many races do you see in the room that you're in right now? When was the last time you talked to your mother?" Some of these questions don't sound that interesting, but when you have 10 million people answering them all over the planet in real time, you might get this really interesting sort of snapshot of what's on the mind of humanity around the world.

Here's an example. The photograph on the iPad app is a 93-year-old guy sitting in his kitchen, drinking a cup of coffee and reading the New York Times. And you think, what does this have to do with big data?

And you touch the corner of the app, and the screen peels back, and underneath you find out that this guy lives in a -- he wanted to live in his own apartment, but his children have had sensors installed all over the apartment, and the system knows that every morning at 9:30, dad basically -- by 9:30, dad's in the kitchen having coffee.

Then, on this Tuesday, dad hasn't left the bedroom and is not in the kitchen having coffee. The sensor didn't get tripped. So a message gets sent to the children, saying, "Hey, you might want to just call dad to make sure he's okay because he hasn't crossed the sensor this morning." So it's showing how these little devices are helping give us feedback that we wouldn't have gotten otherwise.