The Path to Cognitive Science Mastery
I started looking for “the next big thing” about 5 years ago as “mobile apps” were losing their luster and intrigue and I wanted to shift my career towards something that would capture my interest for 5+ years. Turns out, my shiny new toy was already here but in such an embryonic form that I didn’t understand what it was or how I’d get started with it. It was partially “big data” but not quite as that term denotes mostly old school analytics on a massive scale.
Was “data science” the next big thing I’d been looking for? Almost but not quite. Data science blends three areas for which I’m deeply passionate: mathematics, data visualization, and programming. Better yet, it covered so many areas that gaining mastery of it would require patience and dedication that meant an investment in the area would be rewarding in not only transforming my understanding and ability to manipulate information but would also provide job security and a good salary. And hopefully contribute to creating new tools to make society better. :-)
Swami Chandrasekaran created this excellent infographic to capture his view of what it requires to do great data science. As Swami says, data science is comprised of acquiring skills in these 10 areas:
- Fundamentals
- Statistics
- Programming
- Machine Learning
- Text Mining / Natural Language Processing
- Data Visualization
- Big Data
- Data Ingestion
- Data Munging
- Toolbox
So seems anyone wanting to become a data scientist has some serious reading and training ahead of them. Great! Because this gets to the “next big thing” I’d been looking for: Cognitive Computing. And that field is about where mobile development and apps were when the iTouch was first released? Android and iPhone didn’t exist. Native apps didn’t even exist since the iTouch supported only web apps when it first launched in September 2007.
So seems my timing is just about right. By the time cognitive computing takes off over the next few years, I should have up-skilled in each of the 10 areas listed by Swami.
