If evidence is power, the School of Data wants to give power to the people. Non-governmental organizations, journalists, and ordinary citizens often lack the skills to use data effectively to promote their causes or tell their stories. The School of Data’s mission is to help them create a better world.

Remember liner notes? They used to come with every record, tape, and CD, and detailed every composer, musician, and engineer who worked on an album (what, you think Beyonce does everything herself?). Unfortunately, the concept never made it to the digital era. That’s about to change, opening up brand-new ways to discover music online.

Public health researcher Linus Bengtsson made waves by tracking displaced people via their mobile phones, and using that data to predict cholera outbreaks. Now the latest results from his research into the civil war in Cote D’Ivoire show that people's movements are as predictable after a human conflict as they are after a natural disaster.

For years human traffickers have used the latest technology to profit from the slave trade, but now software engineers at big data companies like Palantir and Salesforce are enabling anti-trafficking organizations to fight back--thanks to a little funding help from Google.