Julie Steele
Julie Steele is the Content Editor for Strata at O’Reilly Media. She is co-author of Beautiful Visualization and Designing Data Visualizations. She finds beauty in exploring complex systems, and thinks in metaphors. The best part of her day is finding patterns across verticals and traditional silos, and connecting people who are working on similar problems in seemingly unrelated areas. She is particularly drawn to the visual medium as a way to understand and transmit information.
Julie holds a Master’s degree in Political Science (International Relations) from Rutgers University in Newark. She lives in New York City, where she cooks, reads, designs, and practices yoga.
A bit about Strata Rx: our goals, our content, and you
How our vision for this important conference is shaping the program we hope to present, and how you can get involved
After a strong inaugural event in October 2012, Strata Rx is heading into its second year. My fellow chair, Colin Hill, and I have spent a lot of time thinking about and discussing what we’d like to see on the program this year, and I thought I’d share some of those thoughts for anyone considering submitting a proposal or attending the event. (The Call for Proposals is currently open until April 10.)
One of the most interesting challenges in creating a program about data science in healthcare has been deciding what to leave out. Topics like genomics and cancer research are so vast and complex that they can and do have entire conferences about just them. While we won’t reject a talk for centering on a topic like this, it has to be relevant to one of our larger goals, as well.
What we hope to accomplish with Strata Rx
So what are those larger goals? Well, here are a few of the key ones.
Promote dialog across silos
Right now, there are already a lot of niche conferences for specific groups in healthcare. There are events for specific areas of research, such as oncology and genomics, as previously mentioned. There are also events for specific kinds of people, like pharmaceutical reps, or insurance providers. Those conferences that do cut across the industry are only for one level of people, such as Chief Officers.
We want Strata Rx to convene a broad swath of people with an interest and a stake in the healthcare system: researchers, funders, providers, application developers, patient advocates, board members, insurers, IT staff, legislators, and everyone in between. By starting conversations among these different specialists, and by combining their relative expertise, we believe we can build a stronger community that is better able to solve problems.
We aim to be fire-starters, igniting connections and conversations.
Making government health data personal again
An interview with Fred Smith of the CDC on their open content APIs.
Health care data liquidity (the ability of data to move freely and securely through the system) is an increasingly crucial topic in the era of big data. Most conversations about data liquidity focus on patient data, but other kinds of information need to be able to move freely and securely, too. Enter several government initiatives, including efforts at agencies within the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to make their content more easily available.
Fred Smith is team lead for the Interactive Media Technology Team in the Division of News and Electronic Media in the Office of the Associate Director for Communication for the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta. We recently spoke by phone to discuss ways in which the CDC is working to make their information more “liquid”: easier to access, easier to repurpose, and easier to combine with other data sources.
Which data is available from the CDC APIs?
Fred Smith, CDC
Fred Smith: In essence, what we’re doing is taking our unstructured web content and turning it into a structured database, so we can call an API into it for reuse. It’s making our content available for our partners to build into their websites or applications or whatever they’re building.
Todd Park likes to talk about “liberating data” — well, this is liberating content. What is a more high-value dataset than our own public health messaging? It incorporates not only HTML-based text, but also we’re building this to include multimedia — whether it’s podcasts, images, web badges, or other content — and have all that content be aware of other content based on category or taxonomy. So it will be easy to query, for example: “What content does the CDC have on smoking prevention?”
Not just big data, but better data
Five ways we can improve the information we collect to help us solve hard problems in health care.
I was honored to chair O’Reilly’s inaugural edition of Strata Rx, our conference on data science in health care, this past October along with Colin Hill. As we’re beginning to plan this year’s event, I find myself thinking a lot about a theme that emerged from some of the keynotes last fall: in order to solve the problems we’re facing in health care — to lower costs and provide more personal, targeted treatments to patients — we don’t just need more data; we need better data.
Much has been made about the era of big data we find ourselves in. But though the data we collect is straining the limits of our tools and models, we’re still not making the kind of headway we hoped for in areas like health care. So big data isn’t enough. We need better data.
What does it mean to have better data in health care? Here are some things on my list; perhaps you can think of others. Read more…
Printing ourselves
At its best, 3D printing can make us more human by making us whole.
Tim O’Reilly recently asked me and some other colleagues which technology seems most like magic to us. There was a thoughtful pause as we each considered the amazing innovations we read about and interact with every day.
I didn’t have to think for long. To me, the thing that seems most like magic isn’t Siri or self-driving cars or augmented reality displays. It’s 3D printing.
My reasons are different than you might think. Yes, it’s amazing that, with very little skill, we can manufacture complex objects in our homes and workshops that are made from things like plastic or wood or chocolate or even titanium. This seems an amazing act of conjuring that, just a short time ago, would have been difficult to imagine outside of the “Star Trek” set.
But the thing that makes 3D printing really special is the magic it allows us to perform: the technology is capable of making us more human. Read more…
Why data visualization matters
The best data visualizations expose something new.
Effective data visualizations go beyond aesthetics; they also allow organizations to make quick and correct decisions from massive amounts of information.
Data and the human-machine connection
Opera Solutions' Arnab Gupta says human plus machine always trumps human vs machine.
Managing data and extracting meaning require new approaches, new education, and even a new language. Opera Solutions CEO Arnab Gupta discusses each of these areas in the following interview.
Dusting for device fingerprints
BlueCava can identify specific Internet-connected devices and how they're used. Is this the future of tracking?
BlueCava lets businesses identify devices that are coming to their websites. In this interview, BlueCava CEO David Norris discusses fraud prevention, privacy, and the state of reputation technology.
Data markets aren’t coming. They’re already here
Gnip's Jud Valeski on data resellers, end-user responsibility, and the threat of black markets.
Gnip cofounder and CEO Jud Valeski discusses data markets (and black markets), social media, and real-time data's impact on customer relations.
Strata Week: Data centers
Solving the problem of where to store huge amounts of data
This week, we look at the problem of too much government data, and companies beginning to build air-economized data centers (some in barns!). Plus: a few suggestions for pre-Strata reading on big data.
Strata Week: Shop ’til you drop
Stack Exchange goes in-house, Netflix pays for platforms, survey data gets visualized, and Infochimps acquires Data Marketplace
In this edition of Strata Week: Stack Exchange takes their hardware and software in-house; Neflix explains their adoption of AWS and open source; the New York Times maps out survey and census data; and Infochimps acquires Data Marketplace.
