Sarah Giest, universitair docent in Leiden, gaf op 12 april 2017 een lezing over beperkingen en mogelijkheden van overheden om Big Data in te zetten: "Whereas some call the increased use of big data a revolution at the scale of the Industrial Era, others insist that nothing has changed except for datasets getting bigger. Scholars at both ends of the spectrum however foresee changes in the way policymaking is being done and the way it affects citizens. The former group hopes for decisions that are faster, better supported by evidence and containing less uncertainty, whereas more critical voices question which models for data analytics should be preferred and are more concerned with the lack of analytical capacity from policy-side to fully analyse the data available. This lecture reflects on this debate based on a study of how big data is used to reduce carbon emission in cities. The lecture specifically discusses how the cities of Copenhagen (Denmark), London (UK), Malmö (Sweden), Oxford (UK) and Vienna (Austria) all show how institutional factors limit local government capacity to set up data management structures that would allow further utilization of big data, and that current solutions focus on local pilot sites and outsourcing of data analytics."