Técnicas para el procesamiento y análisis de datos masivos
2026-05-05
“There are differences between the way a physicist looks at a problem compared to a computer scientist,” says Hugo Barbosa, a post-doctoral researcher in Ghoshal’s lab, whose PhD is in computer science. “Physicists are more interested in the fundamental rules, the things that are universal, regardless of the populations. They want to understand the basic components of those models and make those components as general and universal as possible.”
Imagine, for instance, you want to figure out how people walk on a campus. One way of approaching this problem would be to gather all the data possible about every single person on the campus: what they ate that morning, what classes they have at what times, who their friends are, where the buildings are located on the campus, and so on.
“It would, first of all, be virtually impossible to collect all this data,” Ghoshal says, “plus you wouldn’t be able to apply the same conclusions to the ways people walk on other campuses. The buildings are different, the geography is different.”
A second way of approaching the problem involves using the methods Ghoshal and his lab members employ: distilling a system to it basics and applying physics, mathematics, and statistics.” Source: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-we-have-so-many-problems-with-predicting-the-future1/
Batty, M. (2024). Digital twins in city planning. Nature Computational Science, 4(3), 192-199.