Data for Public Benefit

Music lovers could argue that a data scientist working on better song recommendations is doing a public service. We get that.

It's something Adam Bly worked on as the VP of Data at Spotify — improving data discovery to inform anything from product strategy to playlists. Bly stepped into the role after Spotify acquired his company, Seed Scientific, which conceived and built data products for companies like Beats and the United Nations. His resume is dusted with more accolades and accomplishments, too. He was a Visiting Senior Fellow in Science, Technology, and Society at Harvard Kennedy School and founded an award-winning science magazine called Seed.

Recently, Bly has turned his sights back towards the public good (in the traditional sense) with System, a website that aims to explain how anything in the world is related. Think of System like Wikipedia in that it is free, open, and a public resource for knowledge. System gathers statistical evidence of relationships between topics and then organizes and visualizes it.

At a glance, System looks like a web of knowledge graphs, but those are based on semantic relationships (e.g. coffee is a beverage) while System is based on statistical relationships, Bly explained.

“A predicts B, C is caused by D, E and F are highly correlated, G and H change together, etc. By organizing these (billions and billions of) statistical relationships, anyone will be able see anything that's important to them as the system it truly is.”

Bly founded System after recognizing that the biggest global challenges, like COVID and climate change, are systemic while data and knowledge are organized into silos. System was designed to show how the world actually is, so we can change it.

This is the beta 1.0 release and the team has much planned, including soon allowing anyone to contribute evidence of relationships to System. For now, you can start exploring relationships like unemployment and social distancing.

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