Scaling the QS Movement

Larry Smarr at the 2015 Quantified Self Public Health Symposium

Larry Smarr’s major contributions to scientific progress are well known. A physicist and the founding director of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), he helped bring the power of computing to scientific research at a time when computers will still highly specialized instruments. Today he is the Director of the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2), one of the most innovative research institutes in the world.

He’s also an avid self-tracker, using his own data to correctly self-diagnose the onset of Crohn’s disease. At the 2015 Quantified Self Public Health Symposium, Larry spontaneously launched the meeting with a description of what it was like to be at NCSA in the early 90’s when his student Mark Andreessen, the creator of the first popular Web browser, could review every new website in the world by hand. “We could keep up with that little bit of the exponential.” Larry asked us to consider that a similar experience of scaling lies ahead of us in the Quantified Self movement. What happens at the birth of new technologies and new fields of knowledge, when very early participants get to know each other and reflect together on what values and uses will be encoded in our tools, can influence developments that affect hundreds of millions of people.

Watch this 5 minute talk below.

During his talk, Larry mentions an excellent article on the rise of self-tracking in the Washington Post. You can read it here:

Up next:

Health Data Explorers, Kevin Patrick

Quantified Self Labs is dedicated to sharing stories and insights about the role of data access for personal and public health. We invite you to follow along on quantifiedself.com and @quantifiedself. If you have an interest in joining our growing community and attending the 2016 Quantified Self Public Health Symposium please get in touch.