Technology is often designed to make things easier. But what if future technologies were designed to better reflect society? Beth Altringer from the Desirability Lab is exploring this question through POV development.

Connected technology has recently become ubiquitous in consumer health markets. And now many of these products are formally part of the healthcare system. Harvard Business School Professor Ariel Dora Stern and researcher Caroline Mara chart the upward trend and the potential this holds for biomedical research.

Immersive sports analytics overlays the virtual world onto real life with the promise of game-changing results. The SportsXR research team at Harvard’s Visual Computing Group visualizes this new data-rich experience for athletes, coaches, and fans.

Satellites give us a whole new way to look at the effects of climate change on agriculture — from underneath the ground. Angela Rigden, a hydrologist and Harvard postdoc, is using this data to map agricultural "hotspots" and ultimately guide adaptation strategies to protect the world's food supply.

Data science brings clarity to a previously murky territory — the link between the planet's health and our own. Francesca Dominici, Harvard professor and Data Science Initiative co-director, is leveraging unparalleled amounts of data to identify high-risk populations so we can do something about it.

While travelers are sprinting to tight connecting flights, airports are scrambling to make predictions. Visiting Associate Professor Yael Grushka-Cockayne, alongside Heathrow Airport and researchers at University College London, recently built and demoed a machine learning model that removes the guesswork.

Responsible innovation is the name of the game. Giovanni Buttarelli, head of the European Data Protection Supervisor, calls for defining global digital ethics standards and broad input — not just from engineers, but also from the humanities and social sciences — to get there.

You heard correctly. Target is successfully navigating the “retail is dead” — or at least drastically evolving — era. Professor Srikant Datar’s recent case study unpacks how Target went from data rich, but insights poor to lucratively leveraging the information it was collecting. You could say, Target’s in the retail and data business now.

How do we know if social enterprises and impact investors are actually improving low-income consumers' lives? We listen. Or at least, Acumen’s Lean Data team does. So far, they’ve had conversations with over 70,000 people in 27 countries to help inform future investment decisions.

While satellites may be some of our most impressive technology, they are bogged down by a single bottleneck — data. Satellites orbiting Earth routinely struggle to relay data back down to Earth in a timely manner, with sizable implications for the real world, on the ground economy. This is why companies like Analytical Space are hoping to tap into the big data space revolution that is just waiting to happen.