How Big Data Unlocks the New Many-body Physics of Online Threats

Physics is ultimately driven by empirical observations. Thanks to the Internet and its underlying infrastructure, a new world has opened up in which large amounts of data can be freely obtained by academics and industries for both research and commercial applications. Just like measurements of the physical world, however, the data that emerges can be big but messy. In this talk, I will show you that such Big Data not only provides a new source for supplementing existing studies, but it can also open up new Physics as well as a new understanding of pressing problems in the real world. My first example concerns large-scale, ultrafast cyber-physical (e.g. financial) systems in which there is no hope of real-time human intervention when things go wrong, since they are limited only by the speed of light. Though already in use 24/7, the science of such systems is not well understood — in particular, the extreme events or Black Swans which are like digital tsunamis. I will show how studying this particular Big Data can improve our understanding not only of threats in this important real-world all-electronic system, but it can also help our understanding of system failures in many others, including the human brain. As my second example, I will mention how Big Data has revealed a new Physics-centric understanding of arguably the most urgent threat facing society: human extremism and its rapid online growth. Though very applied in nature, the Big Data from this latter domain has unwrapped a wealth of interesting Physics related to many-body out-of-equilibrium systems, and complex dynamical networks. More details of the background research is available at http://www.physics.miami.edu/~njohnson/