Rosemary Barnett

INTRODUCTION Historically, regulatory decisions on the safety of chemicals to both humans and the environment have relied primarily on the availability of in vivo toxicity data to inform hazard and ultimately risk assessment.

The ubiquity of big data is such that Gartner dropped it from their Hype Cycle of Emergent Technologies back in 2015. Across sectors, businesses are scrambling to make every function “data driven,” and there’s no shortage of firms lining up to help them. The big data analytics industry, dedicated to helping big businesses leverage the petabytes of information they now generate and store, is worth $122 billion — and growing.