Yahoo Labs welcomed Michael J. Carey as a special Big Thinkers event on October 28, 2010. He presented a talk entitled, "ASTERIX: Towards a Scalable, Semistructured Data Platform for Evolving World Models". Abstract ASTERIX is a new data-intensive storage and computing platform project spanning UC Irvine, UC Riverside, and UC San Diego. This talk will provide an overview of the effort, starting with its main objective - namely, the storage and analysis of data pertaining to "evolving world models". We will describe the requirements and associated challenges and explain how the project is addressing them. We will provide a technical overview of ASTERIX, covering its architecture, its user model for data and queries, and its approach to scalable query processing and data management. ASTERIX utilizes a new scalable runtime computational platform called Hyracks, which will also be described. We will relate this work to the current state of the art and describe the research challenges that we are currently tackling as well as those that lie further down the road. Finally, we will describe our plans for measuring the success of the project and of the open source software components that are its intended deliverables.