The United States has a silent crisis. People are dying every day from opioid overdoses. Americans are victims of misaligned, biased systems that keep them from accessing the financial services that make home ownership possible. Trust in our election processes is at an all-time low because misinformation and disinformation is rampant online. These are big problems, and there are a lot of opinions and ideas about how to solve them.
Sometimes the solutions offered by the business community are consistent with academic research, but other times, not so much. I'm Liberty Vittert, [? Professor ?] of the Practice of Data Science at Washington University in St. Louis and [? Feature ?] Editor of the Harvard Data Science Review. And I'm Scott Tranter, co-founder and [? Data ?] Science Director at Decision Desk HQ and past co-founder and CEO of Optimus Analytics. And this is Data Nation.
In each episode of Data Nation, Scott and I will look at a challenge facing our society today. We'll dig into the data, get to the facts, and with the help of top scholars and industry experts, we'll try to figure out the best ways to overcome the challenges to solve America's biggest problems. We'll investigate racial profiling and policing and examine the methods that failed to stop it with former NYPD Police Officer and Burlington, Vermont Chief of Police Brandon del Pozo.
You don't want to tell cops that they can never use the physical description of a person to know who to stop and who not to stop, right? Because knowing who to stop is also knowing who not to stop. We'll examine the dangerous side of the data economy, to find out if our data is really safe and private, with New York Times columnist Kevin Roose.
Just having good intentions doesn't matter if you're building some surveillance dragnet that's going to be used to arrest and prosecute women seeking abortions. And we'll consider the damage done by rampant political misinformation with Facebook's former [? Director ?] of Public Policy, Katie Harbath. I don't believe that if you were to shut down Facebook tomorrow, that this problem goes away. I think it continues.
Along with these industry experts, we'll also hear from MIT researchers and professors, like Annette "Peko" Hosoi-- When you're betting on sports, having those statistical algorithms and having that statistical knowledge makes a difference. --and Andrew Lo. Opioids are addictive. They end up generating lots and lots of revenues. People can't stop taking it. Data Nation is a production of the MIT Institute for Data Systems and Society and Voxtopica.
The show launches on September 8, but you can subscribe to Data Nation now on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen. [MUSIC PLAYING]