What is Chance Discovery?
[Definition of Chance Discovery and it's needs]
A "chance" here means an event or a situation with significant impact on human decision making -- a new event/situation that can be conceived either as an opportunity or as a risk. The "discovery" of a chance is to become aware of and to explain the significance of a chance, especially if the chance is rare and its significance has been unnoticed. Desirable effects of opportunities should be actively promoted, whereas preventive measures should be taken in the case of discovered risks. In other words, chance discovery aims to provide means for inventing or surviving in the future, rather than predicting the future.
The concept of the chance discovery here has wide meanings including not only positive opportunity but also negative crisis and risks as being defined. Therefore, many various domains such as marketing, disaster prevention, clinical, intellectual productivity and etc. needs the chance discovery concept. Especially the attention and demands from business domain became so strongly that the Chance Discovery Consortium was established.
[Chance Discovery Double Helix Process]
Chance discovery develops spirally.
In the process of chance discovery, there are two types of helical approach.
One is chance discovery human's approach, and the other is computer's approach with data analysis.
Human approach of helix process as follows;
- Have a particular interest in chance
- Understand meaning of impending phenomenon as chance, and draw up a scenario
- Select chance, and then take actions or run a simulation
- Gain interests in new chance
As "Chance Discovery Double Helix Process", we propose fusion of human's process which progresses spirally and repeats cycles, and computer's process in which a computer repeats the analysis of the environmental data based on his interests and the subject data which recorded his thinking contents. Here, the subject data can be recognized about relation and difference of each other by analyzing and visualizing.
While person is catching up the data-mining environmental data, even its catching-up process is added to data. In other word, helix process by human and computer-aided problem solving is called by Double Helix process because human and computer always continue to work in parallel.
Sensitivity of prepared mind relies on experience and strength of interest based on experience, and is very important. Moreover, interaction between human and environment is absolutely imperative as driving force. Data mining alone does not provide sufficient effect expected with the double helix.
[Seeds of Chance Discovery]
Seeds to support chance discovery are researches such as data mining, cognitive science, natural language processing, risk management, multiagent. From various research points of view, there seem to be many seeds such as an extended idea from a data mining method extracting valuable pattern from time-series data or a mean to interact with environment so that people can easily discover chance.
History of the Chance Discovery Research
The Chance Discovery is research activity consistently started from Japan in Spring, 2000. The Japan Science and Technology Agency and some company fostered research work since then, and the workshops were held. Sessions and Symposiums at international conference such as the Discovery Science were held as well. Recently, the Chance Discovery is positioned as human process, and it is contained within Chance Management in a broad sense. Not only chance discovery with rare phenomenon and circumstances but also comprehensive efforts how to put the chance discovery into action have been studied and practiced in both research and business domain.
