[maxprogram]

I can think of a lot of scientific "big data" applications that would be very challenging problems. There are many domains that need to create & automate better systems that Collect > Organize > Parse > Visualize data. Weather, climate, ecology/species, traffic systems, etc. To do these right would be very challenging and would have a big impact on the world.

Now some self-promotion: I'm looking for a full-time partner to help me with Atlastory, an app that visualizes all of history on a map. This fits with the idea above. It's a simple concept, but there's huge engineering & design challenges involved: imagine all the geographic data involved in Google Maps, now multiply that by 1,000, and figure out the easiest way to obtain/retrieve/display that data.