
Data Science and Blockchain — how do they fit together?
While working as a Data Scientist for an EdTech startup in Berlin I often think about where the borders of data science are. As the most of you already know there are quite a lot of intersections of skills as statistics, economics, informatics, maths — just to name the big four. Due to one’s specification employees are titled nowadays as Data Engineer, Data Analyst, Business Analyst, Data Scientist and Machine Learning Engineer etc.. So sometimes it´s not really clear for me which professions else one can add to data science. But honestly everyone juggling data and searching for patterns in data for instance Neuroscientists do, Physicists, Chemists or Biologists as well. So data science seems to appear as a disruptive technology driven by exponential technological progress in computer science that increases possibilities to extract insight from data in almost all public, private and business sectors. As I zoom out from my perspective on data science fields and applications I try to locate it on a map with different technologies. Following latest news one can apply data science to self-driving cars, robots, health care, recommendations etc. accelerated by cloud computing. But separately from daily posts at LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter about AI, Data Science, Deep Learning and its application I can notice raising numbers of cryptocurrency and blockchain posts.
“What I can not notice is the link between Blockchain and Data Science in articles & posts”
Isn’t there any? Or maybe there is one or a few? Or more? And I ask myself maybe there are too many experts working on each field, but only a handful who can see a connection between them. I wonder. I remember some years back when I was at St. Petersburg University (all Markov-chains fans say YEY!) I hold a presentation about Bitcoin in the course “International Finance” with two classmates. My part was to explain the blockchain technology of BTC. In the end my Prof asked me: “Please Thomas, explain me in one sentence what blockchain is about so my grandmother would understand.” I mercilessly failed! But this pushed me to try to understand it even better and to study more about blockchain. After reading Satoshi´s whitepaper and some articles in the web I wanted to know how to compute a blockchain. Checking some online resources I´ve finally found this free course (klick the link below) from IBM´s cognitiveclass.ai which should be perfect guide as a beginner in blockchain.
https://cognitiveclass.ai/courses/ibm-blockchain-foundation-dev
With hands on programming labs and applications of blockchain from a previous course I realized the connection of Data Science and blockchain is not really hard to figure out.
“The Link between Data Science and Blockchain is Data.”
In a Blockchain Data is stored in a distributed ledger system. @Salih SARIKAYA stated in his article https://bit.ly/30PdimP where Data Science analysis data, the blockchain records and validates data. Since most of data is stored in non-decentralized servers and easy to be attacked by hackers, the blockchain restores the control of data by individuals.
“I see potential in using blockchain for secured Data Science pipelines.”
Furthermore I want to mention for those who already used Python programming in Data Science / Data Engineering, there is a video guide to build a blockchain in Python. It also helps anyone starting to learn Python by building a blockchain.
With this article I want to encourage all Data Science and Blockchain enthusiasts (as I am) to find ways to merge both technologies for even more efficient applications in health, education, environment, telecommunications and where else your fields of interest lies for a better world. Please write about it and share your researches. Thank you for reading!
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Originally published at https://www.linkedin.com.
