Fifteen years ago, Brett Goldstein seemed to be just another tech entrepreneur. He was working as IT director of OpenTable, then a start-up website for restaurant bookings. The company was thriving – and subsequently did a very successful initial public offering. Life looked very sweet for Goldstein. But when the World Trade Center was attacked in 2001, Goldstein had a moment of epiphany. “I spent seven years working in a startup but, directly after 9/11, I knew I didn’t want my whole story to be about how I helped people make restaurant reservations. I wanted to work in public service, to give something back,” he recalls – not just by throwing cash into a charity tin, but by doing public service. So he swerved: in 2006, he attended the Chicago police academy and then worked for a year as a cop in one of the city’s toughest neighbourhoods. Later he pulled the disparate parts of his life together and used his number-crunching skills to build the first predictive data system for the Chicago police (and one of the first in any western police force), to indicate where crime was likely to break out.
This was such a success that Goldstein was asked by Rahm Emanuel, the city’s mayor, to create predictive data systems for the wider Chicago government. The fruits of this effort – which include a website known as “WindyGrid” – went live a couple of years ago, to considerable acclaim inside the techie scene.
This tale might seem unremarkable. We are all used to hearing politicians, business leaders and management consultants declare that the computing revolution is transforming our lives. And as my colleague Tim Harford pointed out in these pages last week, the idea of using big data is now wildly fashionable in the business and academic worlds.