This last episode of this first season of Science & Cocktails in Brussels is a simultaneously fantastic and terrifying experience that will both raise concerns about your privacy and lead you to understand the human benefits of big data. A talk guided by Yves-Alexandre de Montjoye followed by the upcoming alternative rock band Joli Coeur.

We live in a time when information about most of our movements and actions is collected and stored in real time. Everyone is collecting some type of data from you: your google searches, your online food orders, your holiday locations and the profiles of others you check on Facebook. And the availability of large-scale mobile phone, credit card, browsing history, etc, dramatically increases our capacity to understand and potentially affect the behavior of individuals and collectives.

The use of this data, however, raises legitimate privacy concerns. In this event, Yves-Alexandre de Montjoye will discuss how traditional data protection mechanisms fail to protect people's privacy in the age of big data. More specifically, he will show how sensitive information can often be inferred from seemingly innocuous data. He will then discuss some of the socially positive uses of big data and solutions that he and his group is developing at Imperial College London to allow large-scale behavioral data to be used while giving individual strong privacy guarantees.

Afterwards, private cocktails that can be collectively shared while Joli Coeur, an alternative pop rock band, takes the stage and will present its Debut album released this Fall.