In the advent of digital age, wars are becoming increasingly asymmetric. Big data yields not simply a quantitative increase in information, but a qualitative change in how we create new knowledge and understand the world. Information technologies have already begun to revolutionize commerce and science, transforming the economy and acting as enablers for other game-changing…

“We’ve never had this large-scale, anonymised mobile phone data before as a species,” says Nuria Oliver, a scientific director at mobile phone company Telefonica. In the age of international travel it is much easier for diseases to spread abroad, particularly when they have an incubation period of up to 21 days, like Ebola. We are…