According to a recent report, the amount of digital content on the Internet is now close to five hundred billion gigabytes. This number is expected to double within a year. Ten years ago, a single gigabyte of data seemed like a vast amount of information. Now, we commonly hear of data stored in terabytes or petabytes. Some even talk of exabytes or the yottabyte, which is a trillion terabytes or, as one website describes it, "everything that there is".

The explosion of mobile networks, cloud computing and new technologies has given rise to incomprehensibly large worlds of information, often described as "Big Data". Using advanced correlation techniques, data analysts (both human and machine) can sift through massive swaths of data to predict conditions, behaviors and events in ways unimagined only years earlier.

This report, written by David Bollier, captures the insights from the three-day event, exploring the topic of Big Data and inferential software within a number of important contexts.