Google executives were so deeply persuaded by renowned Swedish demographer Hans Rosling’s presentation on world health at last year’s Technology Education Design (TED2006) conference in California that they bought the software tool that had brought his statistics to life.
Dr Rosling, who will speak at the CeBIT Connect Keynote Series at Darling Harbour in Sydney on May 1, is considered one of the most entertaining speakers on real-world applications for IT, even as he addresses his deeply serious areas of expertise in addressing world health issues.
Dr Rosling’s presentation maps global health trends using Trendalyzer, the GapMinder software that lets researchers more easily create powerful, moving graphical images from raw statistical data that caught the attention of Google.
Stockholm-based GapMinder Foundation was set up in 2005 by Dr Rosling, his son Ola Rosling and daughter-in-law Anna Rosling to develop and provide free software to “visualise human development”.
Its Trendalizer software takes decades of raw United Nations data – like country-by-country data on infant mortality, or doctors per capita – and turns it into a visual that makes identifying trends easier.
At Cebit Connect, Dr Rosling is expected to detail some of the advantages he expects will emerging from having the Trendalyzer team – including his son and daughter-in-law – move to the US to join the Google team.
In acquiring the software, Google has committed to “improving and expanding Trendalyzer and making it freely available to any and all users capable of thinking outside the X and Y axes,” the company’s vice-president for search products and user experience Marissa Mayer said.
The company promises the Google acquisition won’t have any impact on Trendalyzer’s free availability – and said the platform would benefit from the broader exposure of Google channels and its R&D resources and expertise.
What makes Dr Rosling so fascinating is that he presents IT as only being a good as its real world application. And though a demographer – formally trained as a statistician – Dr Rosling is first and foremost a doctor and medical researcher.
He has been since 1997 professor of International Health at Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm, has been an adviser to the World Health Organisations, UNICEF and several other aid groups, and was founder of the Swedish chapter of Medicines Sans Frontiers.
While he has collaborated with universities from Asia to Africa to South Amerca on health issues, Dr Rosling’s experience is not academic-based. He has worked on the frontline early in his career in the early seventies as a public health worker in Bangalore, and later as a District Medical Officer in Mozambique where he earned his PhD in 1986 as part of work in identifying konzo as a new disease.
But where Dr Rosling’s research becomes remarkable – and led to the development of the Trendalyzer software – has been in the links between economic development, agriculture, poverty and health in Africa, Asia and Latin America.
The links themselves are startling. But then the ability to visually overlay the economic development and health links of different countries over time is fascinating – and enormously revealing to those looking to improve the human condition.
Blogger who saw Dr Rosling at TED2007 say his presentations are “humourous, yet deadly serious”. He is persuasive, meeting Bill Gates briefly at Davos in January to tell him about new text book on Global Health that Karolinska had produced. Mr Gates later bought 200 copies, one each for each staff member at the Bill and Melinda Gates Fountation.
Google’s Ms Mayer says its acquisition of Trendalyzer software would help the company in its own mission to better organise mass volumes of information.
“Building flexibility into search, email, and other Google products is critically important as we seek to organize the world's information,” Ms Mayer said.
“Trendalyzer generates moving graphics and other novel effects in the display of facts, figures, and statistics in presentations. In its nimble hands, Trendalyzer views development data – such as regional income distribution or trends in global health – as literally a world of opportunity,” Google said in a statement.
“Like Google, Gapminder strives to make information more useful, and Trendalyzer will improve any function or application in which data might be better visualised,” the company said.
CeBIT Connect is a day-long, top level briefing aimed at the most senior levels of management to provide a snap-shop of the global technology issues that are shaping businesses now. Speakers include Mitchell Baker, chief executive at open source phenomena Mozilla; Dave Girouard, enterprise senior vice-president at Google; and Jim Steele, hosted software giant SaleForce.com’s worldwide president. Tickets for this event are still available for $250, including a high powered executive luncheon. Call +612 9280 3400 or visit www.cebit.com.au for more details.
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