Ana Zamora Barberá

By Glyn Povah, Head of Global Product Development at LUCA. Hackathon is derived from the English words “hack” and “marathon”, and if you Google the word “hackathon” you’ll get something like the following: “Noun (informal). An event, typically lasting several days, in which a large number of people meet to engage in collaborative computer programming”. This all conjures up images of lots of developers packed in a dark room, coding on MacBooks for 24 hours, eating lots of pizza and drinking lots of soda. My experience is somewhat different. In fact I’m not a developer at all. Well, not any more anyway. Despite that I still consider hackathons an indispensable part of the new product development process. Actually this post isn’t about hackathons at all really. The central theme is about a collaborative approach to product development that puts customers heart and centre, not as an afterthought. The Smart Digits team in one of the product sessions. Customer-centric product development “We innovate by starting with the customer and working backwards. That becomes the touchstone for how we invent”. Jeff Bezos, CEO Amazon In the Smart Digits team in LUCA, we always take a customer led approach to new product development. It’s how we started out with our first product and it's been part of our DNA ever since. It's not a very Telco approach to product development but it’s worked very well for companies like Amazon and it works very well for us. The hackathons we run are all about collaboration. Not just about collaboration between engineers but a cross-functional team of developers, design UX and UI specialists, product developers and commercial managers. Such a cross-functional team can produce a working prototype in just one day if everyone comes along with the right “hacker” mindset. The goal of any hackathon is having something to touch and feel and something we can show to customers. This could be a command line tool, a GUI or a web app. Bringing to life concepts and ideas we imagine, drawing them on napkins or whiteboards and rapidly getting them into our own hands and then very quickly into customer hands is key to to learning quickly and iterating rapidly. Sometimes the “experience” feels different to us or customers from how we imagine it on paper. Sometimes we discover flaws, challenges or unexpected benefits by playing with our demos and MVPs. Our customers can give rapid feedback too to improve the next iteration. Back to collaboration and customers. Why is our team so insanely customer-focused when developing new products? Fostering the right culture. The goal is to foster a spirit of collaboration in the team where everyone is equal regardless of their role and everyone can have their say and input. All team members across all functions are encouraged to challenge and be challenged. Robust and challenging conversations deliver great outcomes and decisions. Most of all this approach fosters trust and buy-in from the whole team which results in a highly collaborative approach from the start of a new product development project. The same principle applies to involving customers right from start too. This approach engenders trust and high levels of engagement from the get-go. Execution excellence. We believe co-creating with customers gets fast, high quality results that meet customer needs from day one. We have plenty of examples of going from a working prototype as a result of a one day hackathon to a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) we can share with our customer in less than two weeks. Collaborative teamwork at the offices of Wayra UK. Think big, start small As a product team with global remit to roll out new products in 21 countries with access to 350 million customers, our addressable market and opportunity is massive. Further, many of our B2B Enterprise customers are themselves massive global businesses too. So it's natural to want think big from day one. In Smart Digits we like to think big but smart small. Our ambition is always to scale new products globally but we always insist on proving them first with one customer in one country. As a global product development team we need to use our knowledge, experience and judgement to determine which ideas have global potential. Thinking big and starting small doesn’t mean being slow to market. Quite the opposite. We’ve learned to co-create with one customer in one country and quickly launch a MVP. Once proven we can quickly move to scale globally using Agile based development process. So, if you’re a new customer (or an existing one with a new product idea), be careful what you wish for. If you come to us with a new idea or use-case, you might find yourself a few weeks later in a dark room, eating pizza, drawing on whiteboards, napkins or even coding. We’ll have a prototype ready by the end of the day that you can touch and feel and a MVP a few weeks later. So you’d better be ready to integrate on those timescales!

The week started big at MWC with Telefónica's launch of AURA, the "brains" of its 4th platform. With Aura, we enter into a new phase of Telefónica, the era of cognitive intelligence. As you know, our team at LUCA are experts on Big Data and AI, both of them key parts of this digital transformation. We hope you are as excited as we are with this new initiative. Apart from the exciting news of Aura, we took advantage of MWC to show the world several demos that represent part of the work we are doing here at LUCA. Besides showing them at our stand at Barcelona, we want all of you to have access, so we have been writing blog post about them, including a brief explanatory video. The demos showcase our products, some of which are still being built, such as LUCA Comms- focused on the value behind corporate communications data- while others are mature products already in the market, such as LUCA Store- understanding the behaviour of customers outside and inside stores, LUCA Transit- with our data-driven approach to commuting and pollution, and our road safety demo with Open and Mobile Data, and finally LUCA Audience- our solution for Outdoor Media players. But MWC was not just about demos and leads. We've had fresh news during this week. The MWC was the perfect occasion for LUCA to announce two partnerships we have been working on during the past months. Monday we announced our participation in GSMA’s Big Data for Social Good initiative. By leveraging big data capabilities of 16 mobile operators, this initiative will address humanitarian crises, including epidemics and natural disasters. Jointly, the participating operators account for more than 2 billion connections across more than 100 countries. The first trials will focus on epidemics and start from June 2017 in countries such as Bangladesh, Brazil (with Vivo), India, Myanmar and Thailand. And the exciting news doesn't end there. Tuesday, we announced our Big Data for Social Good partnership with UNICEF. Under UNICEF’s Magic Box initiative, real-time data from private sector companies like Telefónica is gathered to better understand humanitarian disasters. The first pilot of this partnership has been shown at MWC in a demo using mobile network data from Colombia to support UNICEF' by providing alarms and supporting critical response in case of natural disasters. We hope you enjoyed this year's MWC, and don't forget to follow our channels to stay tuned for our latest news and initiatives!

Today we are proud to announce our latest collaboration with UNICEF through their Magic Box initiative – a Big Data for Social Good platform which collects real-time data, combining and analysing aggregated and anonymised data from private sector companies. Magic Box was launched in 2014, when it was used to respond to the Ebola crisis in Western Africa, and more recently to the spread of the Zika virus. Unlike other initiatives, which have mostly focused on pilots to demonstrate the value of Big Data to better understand humanitarian disasters, Magic Box goes one step further. It combines real-time data sourced from the private sector with other existing public data sets relating to climate, GIS (UNICEF’s Geographic Information System), and socioeconomic and epidemiological data. By unlocking the value of this real-time data, UNICEF can optimise its response to public health emergencies and natural disasters – protecting children and saving lives in an increasingly unpredictable world. Figure 1: Unicef demo showing mobile communications in Colombia. By means of an Application Programming Interface (API), companies are able to share their anonymised and aggregated datasets in the Magic Box platform, where, once combined with public data sets, provides insights for emergencies. At the Mobile World Congress, we will be demonstrating the first pilot of this partnership, where mobile network data from Colombia will be used to show how data can be analysed to improve the management of humanitarian disasters, providing alarms, and supporting critical response and recovery monitoring. The natural disasters include an earthquake, a landslide and a flood. They were analysed for this first project, using mobile usage data per antenna (e.g. number of calls, megabytes and SMS) and mobility data to understand human movement. You can see a short taster of the demo here: Our VP for Big Data for Social Good, Richard Benjamins, stated: “ So far we have seen a wide range of pilots which show that Big Data can be a force for good, however, we now need to shift from pilots and ‘one-offs’ to real operative systems which provide a continuous data feed. Data needs to come from both the public and private sector and therefore partnerships like this one are key. This is the only way to have a meaningful impact and bring the power of data to the people who need it most.” Alfonso Gómez, President of Telefónica Colombia, also highlighted: “ Colombia is one of the most vulnerable countries to climate change. The telecommunications sector has a pivotal role to play due to the precision and availability of data which can ultimately save lives. Integrating this agreement between UNICEF and Telefónica, the technology, the data and the collaboration across different sectors in a proactive and innovative way will allow us to enhance our capabilities to respond to emergencies”. " Magic Box is a way to bring together partners like Telefonica and others from the private sector, who want to use their data as a public social good. We collaborate with them to build a product that allows us to have real-time insights to improve our work for children around the world. To reach the hardest-to-reach children, we need to know where, when and how to act, and we can do this if we have forward-thinking partnerships in place, now." commented Cynthia McCaffrey, Director, Office of Innovation, UNICEF. As well as sharing datasets as part of the agreement, UNICEF’s innovation department will work closely with us to accelerate the use of Data Science and Data Engineering in developing real-time humanitarian data analytics. Today we join other companies like Google, Amadeus and IBM to enable the growth of Big Data for Social Good in line with the United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals and we're very excited to be a part of this movement.

Last Friday, the first edition of the World Conference on Smart Destinations took place in Murcia. More than 100 experts from over twenty countries discussed trends such as digital tourism, innovation challenges, digital accessibility, tourism intelligence and the sustainable management of tourism resources. The event, organized by the UNWTO together with the Ministry of Energy, Industry and Tourism and the Region of Murcia, brought together public administrations, leading businesses, travel agents, technology players and universities from around the world to analyze the 21st century tourism model. Our CEO, Elena Gil, was one of the speakers, together with main players of the tourism sector including companies and public bodies such as Amadeus and the Global Sustainable Tourism Council. Elena highlighted the immense importance of using data, specifically mobile data, to analyze, optimize and predict the different processes in the tourism sector. She shared how today's traveller is increasingly digital and demanding, stating how companies and local councils need to fulfil their expectations. Figure 1: A screenshot from our LUCA Tourism dashboard. Afterwards, she explained LUCA Tourism, one of our mobile data insights solutions. With this product, we are able to analyze tourist behaviour, gaining key insights on their demographic profiles allowing us to really understand what they want and expect from their trip. Elena explained some of our case studies and also illustrated the two main types of insights we can provide: the movement of people, by showing us a points of interest activity analysis in Barcelona, and the profiling of tourists, through a demo about the demography of tourists in Murcia. If you'd like to find out more, you can watch Elena's full presentation here, in Spanish:

Yves - Alexandre de Montjoye is a lecturer at Imperial College London's new Data Science Institute. As a postdoctoral researcher at Harvard IQSS, his main field of research focuses on metadata privacy. This week, we spoke to Yves about the OPAL project, which is an open technology platform where open algorithms run directly on the servers of partner companies, behind their firewalls, to extract key development indicators for a wide range of potential users, including national statistical offices, ministries, civil society organizations and media organizations - just to name a few. So Yves, tell us more about the OPAL initiative. OPAL is a platform which enables companies to use private data for social good. As I see it, OPAL is a new way of looking at data in a way that you can preserve people’s privacy. It takes us back to the basics. The question is: why did the anonymization of data start? Because we needed a way to use data on a large scale to do statistics and, at the same time, it wasn’t going to affect you because we didn’t know which part of the data was yours. This is why everything started. OPAL is a question and answer system and the idea behind it is to replace the privacy guarantee that anonymization used to provide for small datasets in the past, by solid proofs and IT security. "OPAL is turning a privacy question into a security question." Figure 1: OPAL's motto: bringing the code to the data. The philosophy behind this is about allowing people to use data, but without actually giving the data away. We allow organizations to ask questions about the data and then give them an aggregated answer, but without giving the actual dataset. People from social organizations and NGO's can formulate questions in the form of an Open Algorithm, then we review the algorithm and validate it, and then we run this question in our data. "The fundamental difference of OPAL is that the platform allows you to use the data without giving you a copy of it." In 2006, AOL had a data breach and, basically released search data. After some time, it turned out it was really easy to identify people in this dataset. Then you think we can’t have this data out there, but everyone already had a copy of it. That was 11 years ago and you can still download this dataset on BitTorrent. In 1995, when data anonymization really started we barely had the internet, but now we're in the era of Big Data. A lot has changed in over the past few years so it is essential that we stop and rethink the way we approach data privacy, with proper computer science and security to ensure we use data in a way where we preserve people’s privacy. Figure 2: "It is essential that we stop and rethink the way we approach data privacy". What are the next steps for OPAL to move forward? We have a lot of work ahead of us, figuring out the details and building the platform in a scalable way. We are building a development team here at Imperial College Data Science Institute to do this. In its initial phase of deployment, the project will focus on a small set of countries in Latin America, Africa and Asia. First we are going to deploy it in Senegal, with the help of Orange Sonatel, and in Colombia, with Telefónica. Once we have tested the platform and run it there, we can add new partners. This is the benefit of software solutions, it is easy to deploy in new countries. Once an algorithm has been validated, it can be run around the world! Figure 3: The OPAL steps included on their official website. How would you picture privacy in 10 years? In general, you can really see people are starting to care a great deal about privacy. We have seen a lot of backlash around privacy. There are a lot of good uses of Big Data such as the one generated by mobile phones, but we need to build solutions that allow this data to be used in a way that really protects people's privacy. This is why we're building OPAL.

One of the amazing aspects of working with technology is the potential social good you can do with it. Here at LUCA we strongly believe in the power of using Big Data for Social Good and that is why we are involved in different projects to help reaching the SDG goals. Not related with Big Data but with technology is the initiative called Voluntechies. This organization aims to bring the latest technology to hospitals around Spain, so the kids that are hospitalized can forget for a while their diseases and have some fun using technology. In concrete, they organize virtual reality workshops so the kids can escape from their daily lives and go to a virtual world, meanwhile being at the hospital. Video: Voluntechies initiative brings Virtual Reality to hospitalized kids. Last week I had the chance to participate in one of the workshops, this time visiting the hospital of La Paz in Madrid. First we helped the kids building their own VR glasses (it was difficult even for me!), to afterwards being able to travel to the space, do an expedition on the dinosaurs era, swim with sharks at the aquarium of San Diego, and even getting inside a One Republic videoclip. This workshop was possible thanks to the foundation Voluntarios Telefónica, which partners with Voluntechies since they started. Figure 1: Some of the Telefónica volunteers after the VR workshop at La Paz hospital. The project, which only started a year and a half ago, has been recently nominated to the G5 Innova awards to social innovation. With the goal of reaching 100.000 people by 2020, Voluntechies keeps working so they can spread the network to other hospitals and schools, both outside and within Spain. Want to help or sponsor the initiative? Find out more here.

Yesterday evening, RTVE launched the first in a series of documentaries entitled "Documentos TV", showing just how digital our daily lives have become and how the control of these digital activities is one of the biggest battles of our time. The first episode, "Big Data, Living with Algorithms" ("Big Data: Conviviendo con el Algoritmo") , featured experts from the technology sector, including Telefónica's CDO, Chema Alonso, who explained how the development of algorithms that predict our behavior bring us closer to a world of decisions made by Artificial Intelligence. Figure 1: Chema Alonso in the documentary: 'Big Data, conviviendo con el algoritmo'. The documentary covered important topics such as Internet of Things, which our CDO expanded on by discussing the cybersecurity matters surrounding the topic. Chema commented: " The rapid expansion of IOT across all sector is extremely complex, for this reason it is fundamental that we take security and ethics into consideration from the beginning when designing systems, otherwise it will be difficult to control in the future." To see what else he had to say, watch the entire documentary online here.

This article was originally posted by Florence Broderick on the WEF Live blog as part of the 2017 World Economic Forum Annual Meeting in Davos. Imagine a world where the billions of Google searches we make every year could be used to treat dengue fever. Imagine a world where our daily interactions with mobile networks could be used to help our local governments understand traffic to make our cities greener. Imagine a world where our social media updates could be used to predict crime hotspots. Today, all of the above (and much more) is possible. Whether we like it or not, we are living through an era of exponential data explosion, and somehow, through responsive and responsible leadership, we must move from just using data for commercial benefit to also using data for social good. As a Millennial working in the world of telecommunications, I see hundreds of opportunities to use the exabytes of information we create on a daily basis to improve the lives of people in both developed and developing countries. Our world’s great advances in Big Data and Artificial Intelligence have brought a remarkable level of sophistication to areas such as e-commerce, manufacturing and logistics, just to name a few examples. After making these extensive investments, private sector organizations are now finding new use cases to re-apply their data and analytical capabilities to have a social impact - learning that actually, data philanthropy could potentially be just as powerful as traditional philanthropy in a world where (excuse the cliché), data is the new oil. Figure 1: Could "Data Philanthropy" become as powerful as traditional philanthropy? However, there are a series of challenges facing those who are keen to drive forwards the Big Data for Social Good initiative in their companies. For example, many business leaders have only recently been told that data is their “greatest asset” and are therefore hesitantly holding back the key to their data lakes. Equally, they are worried about cannibalizing other business opportunities. What impact could doing free or reduced Big Data projects have for their commercial pipeline in the public sector? This is precisely why it is so important for us to find sustainable business models for Big Data for Social Good, enabling serious and consistent collaboration between the private and public sector as well as NGOs. Nicolas de Cordes, a pioneer in the field, said to me an interview the other week: “ To scale up, we will have to make this profitable. However, we can’t make profit the main driver of our actions, the private sector has to take into account the indirect social benefits of making such projects work.” For this reason we need leaders who care about the big issues, not just their annual KPIs, who keep the Sustainable Development Goals at the back of their mind in their decisions and drive their organizations forwards responsibly, without forgetting the values we so desperately need in an increasingly divided and disobedient world. Chief Data Officers are also concerned about the security risks associated with sharing data sets outside of their own infrastructure. What if the competition got their hands on the data? Or what if the anonymization processes of other parties are not as robust as those in place in their companies? This is something that projects such as OPAL are trying to address with their Open Algorithms approach. Nonetheless, there is a much more complex challenge hanging over Big Data for Social Good: the dark cloud of data privacy. In recent years, the media spotlight on Snowden, Wikileaks and a string of high profile cyberattacks has led us all to ask questions about the way organizations use our data - and rightly so. But how will this evolve when the decision-makers in the boardrooms are Millennials or Generation Z? Will their differing attitudes to privacy affect the way they decide to use data even if it isn’t personal data being used anyway? Will their “data-savviness” and technological prowess allow them to find sustainable ways to convince consumers to let them exploit their anonymized data for social good? Figure 2: Florence Broderick giving her speech at the last One Young World Summit, in Ottawa. At One Young World, I spoke about this very matter and I asked my 18 - 30 year old peers: how many of you would opt-in for your mobile phone data being used for social purposes? Overwhelmingly, the answer was yes - which perhaps has something to do with the supposed notion that 84% of Millennials consider it their duty to make the world a better place. But does this mean young people care less about privacy? Does it mean they are more likely to drive forwards the Big Data for Social Good in their respective countries? The world’s most influential Millennial, Mark Zuckerberg, controversially said “privacy is dead” in 2010, painting a very negative picture for something which is in fact a fundamental human right. Of course, not all Millennials agree with the Facebook CEO, but it is true that they are less concerned about the privacy of their data than other generations. This is echoed in the fact that only 44% of them trust in companies to keep their personal information private, whilst only 32% of baby boomers do. Will future generations continue to care less about privacy and invest more trust in organizations? Or will their attitudes slide towards those of their seniors in the years to come as they build careers, buy houses and have children? If we want to overcome the privacy challenge and grow the Big Data for Social Good initiative then we desperately need the leaders of today and tomorrow to reassure society by using data in a responsible way, as well as prioritizing cybersecurity so that our information is safe. If we can achieve this, then we will definitely see one-off exploratory Big Data for Social Good projects evolving into recurrent and impactful services. This will enable policy makers and NGOs to accelerate towards the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals with the responsible and responsive management of data. It’s time for data to drive our decisions and it’s time to harness the power of information for the good of mankind.

This article was originally posted by the Chairman of Telefónica, José María Álvarez Pallete, on the World Economic Forum blog. Big data and, more recently, artificial intelligence have become some of the world’s favourite boardroom buzzwords in the past three years. Every CEO feels some level of nervous excitement about the immense opportunity of big data, with the International Data Corporation predicting revenues will rocket from $122 billion last year to more than $187 billion in 2019. Forrester Research forecasts that the big data technology market will grow three times faster than the IT market overall. All this buzz about becoming data-driven has led us to make more than significant investments in big data technology, convinced that data scientists and their advanced analytics will give us answers and reshape our businesses as we know them. But how should we be measuring our success when it comes to big data? Is it a lift in our average revenue per user (ARPU)? Is it a slight drop in our churn? Or is it a marginal increase in the efficiency of our network? For me, it’s all of those things, but equally, as a private sector multinational, we want to ensure that we are going above and beyond to apply the capabilities we develop in big data for social good. When I think about big data in telecommunications, I think about the 350 million customers we serve worldwide and the 23 billion mobile events they create every day in 21 countries. When I think about social good, I think about the commitments we have all made with the UN when it comes to the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) for 2030, which represent 169 targets with 241 proposed indicators . Forging a relationship between our big data and work for global social good is fundamental, especially as 80% of the 6 billion mobile phones in the world are in developing countries, which is where we can have the greatest impact. Figure 1: Mobile cellular subscriptions per 100 inhabitants. To maximize this impact, I strongly believe we have to go much further than just telco data. To accurately measure our progress on the SDGs we will need to focus on goal 17, which is about working in partnership to achieve the goals. Collaboration between the public and private sector is crucial to advance a global open data initiative, but it is also of great importance to ensure more private sector data is used. This means bringing together data from the financial services sector, utilities providers, retailers and search engines, amongst others, to investigate how combining multiple data sources can provide achievable insights for policy-makers and NGOs. As an example of this, linked to SDG 3 on good health and well-being, our Telefónica R&D team carried out research on our data in Mexico during the H1N1 flu outbreak. Human mobility directly accelerates the spread of diseases, so, using our Smart Steps mobile phone data technology, we investigated mobility patterns before and after the government advised citizens to stay at home. This showed that only 30% of people actually stayed at home, whilst 70% showed barely any changes in their day-to-day behaviour. Over time, this data-driven approach to epidemic response will inevitably help us to control such challenges for global health. Figure 2: A nurse holds up a bottle of the vaccine against H1N1 influenza at a hospital in Guanajuato, Mexico. Image: REUTERS/Mario Armas. Equally, data from the financial services sector can also help us achieve SDG 13, which focuses on climate action. In September 2016, BBVA used its sale payments and ATM cash withdrawal data to measure people’s economic resilience to natural disasters during Hurricane Odile, one of the most destructive hurricanes in almost 25 years in Mexico. Of course, combatting climate change requires a shift in the way we behave, but big data projects such as this or our study on commuting and pollution, are pivotal in ensuring climate doubters start to take this seriously. We’re already taking it seriously having committed to run 100% of our business with renewable energy sources by 2030. Making big data for social good a success has its challenges . Chief data officers are inevitably concerned about privacy and security. Legal implications vary in every country, meaning that anonymization and aggregation processes need to be adaptable and exceptionally robust. Equally, chief communications officers are worried about what using customer data does to their organizational reputation – even if it has an overwhelmingly positive outcome for society. However, if we want to make big data the success everybody projects it to be, then we must ensure we overcome these challenges and start measuring its success, not only on its commercial potential, but also its ability to bring value to society. If we can find a consistent way for NGOs and the private and public sectors to work together, such as the Open Algorithms Project , then we will see big data as a different kind of buzzword: not just as a moneymaker, but as a society-shaker.

Every year, from the 9th to the 17th of May, Girona celebrates the “Temps de Flors”, one of the most popular flower festivals in Europe. For ten days, the streets of the city come to life with music, colour and the smell of exotic flowers. During this period, thousands of visitors flood the city enjoying the charm of this unique Catalonian festival with the backdrop of one of the most famous Game of Thrones filming locations. For 2 years in a row, we have been working with Girona's local government to enable them to take a more data-driven approach to this touristic event, ensuring that the festival is as successful as possible for the organisers. One of LUCA's products (Smart Steps) analyses crowd behaviour by aggregating and anonymising our mobile network event data to provide actionable insights to decision-makers in the public sector in areas such as mobility, infrastructure planning and in this case, tourism. Our study enabled the city of Girona to become a pioneer in Big Data analysis for tourism, analysing millions of mobile data events per day to understand the behaviour of tourists as well as where they come from and how long they stay. Smart Steps prioritises security and privacy at all times, carrying out a robust and exhaustive anonymisation and aggregation process to analyse the movements of groups of people, rather than individual tourists to provide trend insights and patterns. After this, an extrapolation is also applied to provide an accurate representation of both national and international tourists. Key insights allowed us to estimate that Girona had a total of 244,199 visits to the city during the festival. With 90% of visitors coming from Catalonia, 2% from the rest of Spain and 8% from other countries. Figure 2: Thousands of people walk the streets of Girona during Temps de Flors. Furthermore, of the Spanish national visitors, we could identify that of the 92% of visitors visiting from Spain, 60% were from regions within Girona, 35% from Barcelona, 2% of Tarragona and 1% of Lleida. The study also showed that the gender and age split was consistent among the different regions, apart from in Girona where visitors were slightly younger on the whole compared to other areas of Catalonia. Figure 3: Heatmap of national tourists on the Festival de las Flores. We also saw in the analysis that 18,881 visitors came from outside of Spain, 82% of which came from 9 countries: France, Holland, Germany, Belgium, Great Britain, Italy, Poland, Russia and the USA. French visitors were the most prominent, accounting for 45% of the total. Some years ago, the only way of obtaining this kind of data was by carrying out more traditional visitor surveys. However, now, thanks to Big Data, it is possible to obtain an in-depth analysis of the movements and behaviours of large groups of people. These tourism insights are extremely valuable to both public and private sector decision makers, as they allow them to adapt their offering to give tourists an even better experience. Interested in finding out more about our Big Data tourism products? Watch Dave Sweeney's presentation on our YouTube channel or drop us an email here. Written by Ana Zamora

Over the past 2 days our LUCA team have been in full force at the Big Data Spain 2016 event, which was held this year in Kinepolis in the Ciudad de la Imagen. This technology summit, run by Paradigma Digital, brings together over a thousand Big Data professionals and is already in it's fifth edition. This year, we sent several members of our team from both our Data Science wing and our recruitment area to share information on our new Big Data brand and run our technical challenge which we mentioned on our blog the other day to the wide range of data enthusiasts visiting our stand throughout the two day festival of data. Figure 1: The LUCA team at Big Data Spain 2016 Proceedings kicked off with a welcome note from Oscar Méndez from Stratio before us hearing about the very popular matter of Artificial Intelligence, from Paco Nathan from O'Reilly Media who raised some poignant issues about AI replacing humans in industry. He showed an interesting slide that showed that the most common job in almost all states of the USA is indeed a truck driver, so perhaps we should think more about how and if the economy will allow for machines to replace us in the swift fashion many are expecting. Throughout the morning session, we also particularly enjoyed Kay Broderson's talk on CausalImpact, which you can find more information on here on Github. He demonstrated how this approach can be used to estimate the causal effect of a designed intervention on a time series, using the example of an advertising campaign to explain the technology to the audience. The afternoon sessions also touched some of our favourite topics, including Open Data ( From Insight to Visualization with Google BigQuery and CARTO) and the role of Stream Processing in Big Data and the Internet of Things. As well as more technical sessions with fascinating demos, there were also some insightful more academic talks about Growing Data Scientists and Managing Data Science, which were delivered by Amparo Alonso from the University of A Coruña and David Martinez from University College London. On Day 2, our CDO, Chema Alonso took to the stage for his keynote. He opened up by discussing the increasing threat of smartphones to our privacy, explaining how their extensive sensors, GPS, WiFi and accelerometers exist to create data - data which tells a lot about who we are and importantly, where we are. Chema explained that location data is pivotal, and although many of us innocently think that by switching off "Location Services" we are not being tracked - it is not actually true at all. Figure 2: Chema Alonso explains the important link between Big Data and Security. He explained that the apps we have installed on our phones start to understand us from the moment we install them, giving them permission to access information such as file location and account credentials. By quickly clicking "I Agree" we hand over our most important personal information such as our email address, our mobile phone number, our social media accounts and everything which we are logged into. Chema then went on to discuss Tacyt, an ElevenPaths product which monitors, stores, analyzes, correlates and classifies millions of mobile apps while adding thousands of new apps every day. However, he mentioned that aside from apps there are many other ways of tracking us. For example, via WiFi we share the name of our home network, the location of our daily coffee shop and plenty of other information that we're not aware of. Battery cookies are also another way of knowing where we are and where we go everyday. Furthermore, he shared how telcos can also gather extensive location data through the mobile network without even considering GPS signal, explaining that mere location data gives away a lot more than just where you are. For example, where you go on holiday, where you work, where you shop, if you go by car or train or even where you park the car. Additionally, by knowing how long you are there, telcos can infer how much you sleep, if you have any lovers, your affluence - all of which can be combined to build a relatively accurate user profile - moving from where you are to who you are. Figure 3: Chema discussed a Play Store bug which "scared" people. The Telefónica CDO then went on to explain that this data can be used for a lot more than commercial purposes such as advertising, but rather for anti-fraud products, traffic prediction or emergency services. He discussed how LUCA is ensuring they apply their commercial expertise to use Big Data for Social Good by analyzing data from natural disasters in Mexico or using mobility data to reduce CO2 emissions. Chema finished his talk by inviting all of us to stop for a second and have a good think about the most relevant questions. Firstly the legal questions: are the terms and conditions clear enough? Are people aware of what the "yes, I agree" really means? Secondly the ownership questions: who is the owner of our data? And if it is companies right now, then we have the questions of trust to address: do we know what they are doing with our data? And most importantly, is it all worth it? The link between Big Data and Privacy continues to pose a wide range of technical and ethical questions for all us, and although many are still in intense debate, Chema clearly underlines the importance of security being at the centre of everything we do - protecting users and ensuring transparency for customers.

On February 3rd, Synergic Partners, the niche Big Data consultancy wing of LUCA, will organize the " Women in Data Science" conference for the first time in Madrid - in collaboration with Stanford University. This event, which will take place in the Wayra offices in Gran Vía, aims to bring together Data Scientists and Big Data professionals, inspiring more women to pursue careers in the field with training and mentoring opportunities from other females from all over the world. In 2015, the conference's 23 distinguished speakers attracted 400 attendees from 30 universities and 80 different companies, as well 6000 additional participants via live stream. This year, this international event will take place in more than 50 cities all over the world, including New York, Paris, Berlin, São Paulo, Bogotá, Beirut and Singapore - among many others. Video: What is WiDS all about? Women in Data Science, otherwise known as WiDS, provides a unique opportunity to bring together Data Science experts from a wide range of sectors to learn, collaborate and accelerate research in the field. This year, Stanford University have selected the CEO of Synergic Partners, Carme Artigas, to inaugurate the first Madrid-based event where she will also participate in the "Beyond Data Science" conference, as well as acting as a moderator in one of the roundtables. " As an ambassador for WiDS Madrid, I want to raise awareness about the Data Science discipline and show just how impactful it can be, not just for different industries, but also for society. I am also keen to ensure that women are heard in the field and will play a key role in this transformation," said Artigas. The Madrid event will bring together a wide range of experts from across Spain, including Amparo Alonso (Artificial Intelligence R&D Lab Director), Angela Shen-Hsieh (Product Innovation Director at Telefónica R&D) and Rosa María Sanz (Directora General de Personas y Recursos de Gas Natural). Want to sign up? Find out how you can get involved here.

The global cost of fraud per year is approximately $3.7 trillion according to a 2014 survey , meaning that the average fraud impact per organization is estimated at around 5% of its annual revenue. Whilst many believe that fraud cases tend to be multi-million dollar affairs, when in reality the survey revealed that the average loss was actually $145,000 . The growing number of annual data breaches and hacks of prominent consumer brands such as Talk Talk has generated tension amongst the general public, with users become increasingly aware of the risks created by our ever growing digital footprints. In fact, the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners has started to hold an Annual Fraud Awareness Week which will take place from November 13th to 19th this month. A wide range of data-driven companies are looking at ways to use their Big Data to help themselves, or others, to reduce the impact of fraud in their organizations using cutting-edge analytical techniques. At LUCA, our security portfolio has a wide range of B2C and B2B products which look to fight fraud from an end-to-end perspective, working closely with our colleagues at Eleven Paths - our specialist cybersecurity unit in Telefónica. As we see it, there are many different strategies to detect fraud: compromised points of purchase; payment fraud intelligence; online threat insights etc. However, we also believe that telco data from network events, operations systems and CRM systems can provide groundbreaking insights to organizations looking to reduce the "black fraud hole" they are facing in their P&L. To ensure this can take place, we have implemented a quick and smooth integration between our data insights platform and our fraud management solutions by bringing different teams together merging the worlds of Security & Big Data to bring new value to our corporate customers with products such as Smart Digits. Figure 2: Big Data and Security slide from Chema Alonso's LUCA launch keynote Pedro Pablo Pérez, CEO of Eleven Paths, spoke about these very products at the LUCA launch, highlighting key use cases simulating real situations. We highlighted the benefits for the end consumer, using a clear consent process to mitigate the effects of fraud - fighting the increasingly savvy fraudsters in the online world: Figure 3: Pedro Pablo talking about Fraud detection using Big Data Want to know more about how we're bringing Big Data and Security together to fight fraud? Drop us an email here. By Daniel Torres, Global Product Manager at LUCA.