Professor Hans Rosling held a presentation at the IT conference Visby Agenda in which he showed how global development of health can be made clear with the help of software processing statistics, displaying it in the form of moving images. He takes a critical view of the lack of available statistics in the EU which, in his opinion, limits innovation in the field.

How do you use IT?
“The programme I use to animate data for my presentations has been developed by the foundation Gapminder. It is a rather typical example of innovation: there was a demand, and then someone found the technology to supply that demand.”

How can IT change our view of the world?
“I introduced animation in my teaching to clearly show how public health changes over time in different countries. In the pictures I use, time is represented by movement – we show different indicators as they move across the picture. Our world has a long, continuous history and I am trying to describe it.”

How can information and communications technology change the everyday lives of EU citizens?
“Conferences such as this one here in Visby must give a lot more concrete examples of entrepreneurship and innovation – I think people are taking the road more travelled!

”I am running this project all over the world and I have found that China, to name one example, is better at making statistics available than several of the EU countries. The EU must set up good, interactive websites with machine-readable downloading of statistics. Make statistics available and innovations in the area will come.

”Just think of Chopin’s ”Nocturne” for example. When you see the notes you cannot tell that the piece of music is beautiful. When you place the notes on the grand piano, it still is not beautiful. But when somebody plays, it becomes beautiful. The statisticians compose, those who development the service are building the instrument and when people start playing the music - then it becomes beautiful!”

Watch Hans Rosling’s speech at Visby Agenda via the link on the right.