Big Data, and increasingly Artificial Intelligence, are hot topics in business and society, and many people and organizations have an interest to master those topics better to understand how to apply it to their business or activities. This books gives many examples of how big data is used in different use cases and applications across a variety of sectors. In this book we let data “speak” to tell stories. Stories that matter for business, for people and for society.

The book also explains some fundamental concepts of Artificial Intelligence (AI); we feel there is a need to equip readers with knowledge to sift through the many popular articles appearing on the impact of AI, and to let them form their own opinion.

Much of the content of this book has been published on the Internet in our Data-Speaks blog of LUCA (data-speaks.luca- d3.com). Writing quality content is time consuming process, and we believe there is an added value in packaging up this content in a thematic and coherent way. While this book is printed, and gives a snapshot of six months of blog writing, the blog continues to grow with 1 post per workday.

This book is a joint effort of the LUCA team. LUCA is the Big Data business unit of Telefónica. The mission of LUCA is to accompany organizations –enterprises, public administrations- on their transformational journey to become a data-driven organization. LUCA stands for the Last Universal Common Ancestor, which is the last organism which all life on Earth has in common. After LUCA the organisms start to diverge. In the same way, we believe that in the digital world, data is something that all organizations will have in common for the times to come, hence LUCA.