Featured Research Videos

Many of the Communication Faculty have TedX talks and other videos.

 

The Cape Makes the Superhero

How does the entertainment we choose affect our behavior? In a thoughtful talk, Jorge Peña discusses how the choices we make in video games can actively change how we sense ourself.

 

Big Data Requires Big Visions for Big Change

In this TEDx talk, Martin Hilbert asks if data scientists will dominate the world in the future.

While this seems to be an omnipresent conclusion nowadays, it will certainly not be the case. Data are based on what happened in the past, which restricts our forecasting ability to futures similar to the past. But aim at creating futures distinct from the past: hopefully a "better world." Making predictions about changing futures requires more than data; it requires theory-driven models that envision futures that do not exist in data.

 

Mankind From Space is an Epic Journey of Discovery

Using mind-boggling data and visualizations, this documentary produced for NatGeo, PBS and the Discovery Channel traces humankind's story from hunter-gatherer to dominant global species.

Within this transformation, changes in the global communication landscape have been essential. Martin Hilbert contributed to elaboration of the following visualizations and analogies that reveal how we've transformed our planet and produced an interconnected world of extraordinary complexity.

Mankind From Space is an Epic Journey of Discovery

 

The Virtual Self

How video games and virtual experiences change people's behavior

Jorge Peña delivered this talk on April 24, 2015, at the Institute for Social Sciences conference series "Leading Research in the Social Sciences Today."

 

The Theory, Practice and Limits of Big Data for the Social Sciences

Martin Hilbert talks about data and data driven growth

This talk presents some of Martin Hilbert's recent results about the theoretical framework of how to think about data-driven growth, as well as several instructive real-world examples of big data use (some of them funny, others rather scary). In the presentation, he also discusses the limitations of big data in explaining the social sciences.

 

Making it Count

Big data, the open revolution and public engagement

Keynote speaker Martin Hilbert discusses opportunities, threats and policy challenges linked to the ongoing data revolution.

 

World Info Capacity Animation

Changes in the quantity and qualitative way in which humankind handles information and communication have become the driver of social evolution.

This animation, produced in cooperation with The Economist, presents several intuitive analogies that explain the growth of the world's technological capacity to store, communicate and compute information.