Secrets of Big Data - Season 1

First aired: 7/4/2022 6 episodes

Episodes

1. Beat down by Data

Aired: 7/4/2022

A British warship has its location mysteriously faked when its automated tracking data is compromised, sparking a tense military standoff with Russian forces in the Black Sea. An American teenager is arrested and beaten by police after parking his car in an area determined to be a hotspot for crime by a computer algorithm. A LiDar scan of the Amazon rainforest reveals several strange circular depressions on the jungle floor. An Indian woman has her livelihood destroyed by a cyclone twice in twenty years, but artificial intelligence may just prevent it from happening again.

2. Rise of the Autonomous Machines

Aired: 7/4/2022

Iran's top nuclear scientist is assassinated in a brazen daylight attack that may involve remote controlled weaponry assisted by artificial intelligence. On a quiet night in Arizona, a driverless car is out for a test drive when it fails to recognize a pedestrian in its path. At a famous auction house, a French portrait created by an algorithm goes up for sale, stoking controversy in the art world. In Japan, doctors turn to big data to diagnose a woman's illness when attempted treatments prove ineffective.

3. Augmented Eternity

Aired: 7/4/2022

A Detroit man is arrested and dragged away in front of his family as police use facial recognition technology to arrest a suspected thief. Unable to cope with his grief, a Canadian writer creates an AI chat-bot to reconnect with a lost loved one. A London-based stock trader uses algorithms to beat the market at its own game and sets off a chain of events that threatens the stability of the world's financial markets. In Tanzania, African park rangers use new technology to identify and catch illegal hunters.

4. Bit Con

Aired: 7/4/2022

The owner of Canada's largest cryptocurrency exchange dies under mysterious circumstances while on his honeymoon in India, leaving a trail of financial devastation behind. An American woman suffering from a series of painful medical issues is denied access to prescription medication because an algorithm flags her as high risk to abuse drugs. After suffering a stroke and disappearing from the public eye for several weeks, the president of Gabon appears in a video addressing the country's citizens, but his appearance leads some people to believe that all is not as it seems to be. A humble Indian farmer is invited to participate in a program that uses artificial intelligence to improve crop yields.

5. The SolarWinds Hack

Aired: 7/4/2022

The United States government suffers the largest and most intrusive cyberattack in its history and the perpetrators are believed to be a familiar Cold War foe. A young New York City job seeker engages in a series of on camera interviews where an algorithm analyses his every word and gesture to determine his suitability for employment. A Wisconsin man convicted of a petty crime has his plea deal surprisingly overturned by a judge after an algorithm determined that he was at high risk to re-offend. In India, an engineering student specializing in data science sets out to develop an application that uses artificial intelligence to translate sign language into text in real time.

6. Future Games

Aired: 7/4/2022

A dominant Spanish badminton player uses technology in an effort to accomplish something that nobody in the sport has ever done before. An American man is wrongfully convicted of a crime based on an inaccurate lie detector test, but advances in AI may prevent this from happening in the future. As a joke, an Indonesian student offers his selfies for sale as non-fungible tokens on an internet marketplace and goes viral, earning him a small fortune in the process. An American speech pathologist teaches her dog to communicate by tapping programmed buttons, leading to a debate about whether or not artificial intelligence can be used to decode animal language.