Illuminus™
Produced for Episode 3 “Like Mining” of Do Not Track, the award-winning personalized documentary series about tracking and the web economy, Illuminus™ uses a fictional scenario of a corporation deciding your financial services to uncover real-life techniques of data analysis. The application first analyzes users’ Facebook data to build a character profile, revealing insights into how Facebook targets users and matches them to ad content. it then determines users’ Big Five personality traits to show how seemingly boring data can be used to determine behavior.
Finally, Illuminus™ uses this information to assess users' potential health and financial risk and concludes whether or not a user would be a good candidate for health insurance or a loan. While Illuminus™ is not a real company, the app is, employing research in psycho-demographic trait predictions developed at the University of Cambridge Psychometrics Centre, as well as additional information published in the Journal of Risk Research. Use the app at illuminus.io.
Creators: Owen Mundy, Tim Schwartz, Brett Gaylor, Christiane Miethge
Production: Eric Drier, Maxime Quintard, Nicolas Menet, Sébastien Brothier, Margaux Missika, Gregory Trowbridge, Richard Gutjahr, Auriane Meilhon
Development: Owen Mundy, Tim Schwartz, Raphael Arbuz
Predictions: The University of Cambridge Psychometrics Centre, Dr Michal Kosinski, Vesselin Popov, Dr David Stillwell, Bartosz Kielczewski, Apply Magic Sauce API
Owen Mundy
Owen Mundy is an artist, designer, and programmer. Mundy’s research investigates public space, information privacy, and big data. He teaches a range of subjects for both the study and production of data visualization, internet art, interface design, game design, and physical computing.
Owen Mundy is a former photographer in the US Navy where he unloaded surveillance film on the flight deck of an aircraft carrier. He has worked in journalism, marketing, and creative fields. Mundy had a ten-year career in web and app development including the multimedia NEH-funded African Americans in Cinema history project. Mundy co-founded Your Art Here, a non profit organization to put art on billboards and other public places usually reserved for advertising.
Recent works include mobile and web-based apps and visualizations like illuminus.io, a research-based personality and risk analysis tool which appears in the Peabody-awarded web documentary Do Not Track; the online viral big data visualization, I Know Where Your Cat Lives, which maps seven million images tagged with #cat using the locations in the metadata users unknowingly uploaded to social media; and Give Me My Data, a tool that helps users export their data back out of Facebook. My work has been reviewed in The New York Times, The Atlantic, Time Magazine, NPR, and Wired Magazine and exhibited in multiple museums and galleries in New York, Berlin, Los Angeles, Rotterdam, and Mexico City. Owen Mundy has received numerous artist fellowships, a DAAD Arts Study Scholarship, and a Fulbright Fellowship. I am a Visiting Associate Professor of Digital Studies at Davidson College and an avid mountain biker.