Data Science and Beyond
Experts often possess more data than judgment
- Colin Powell
Big Data, Data Science, Machine Learning and Statistics are buzz words that you will keep hearing more and more in the time to come. Ever wondered why the world is going crazy over Data?
Let us wind the clocks back to mid 2000s and see what the world looked like from a technological purview. E-commerce was slowly taking its shape, Google was starting to take over the internet, we saw the advent of multiple social networking sites and the biggest of all, adoption of smart phones. At the time, businesses were still trying to on-board people to their platforms and were testing the soil to see if the world was really ready for them.
People all over the world started coming together and technology started finding its way into the daily lives of the people. People came in millions onto the platforms, creating a surge in the growth of data that was getting stored.
Coming back to the present, all the businesses established back then, have a driving seat to the future, sitting on a vehicle that is fueled by data.
Now, what exactly is Data Science?
Data science is the art of looking at Data and trying to extract some meaningful insights.
Yes, I am using the word science and art in the same statement because it not only takes technique to work with data but also an eye, a passion and a sense of excitement to work with it.
Data science involves the techniques of acquiring data, refining them, exploring the possibilities, building mathematical models that represent them and finally generate insights.
There is no one equation that solves all data science problems. The only thing common to all of them, is the approach. Understanding the domain and having a hold over the different techniques takes years of practice and patience. This is the reason, data scientists and data engineers are sought after.
In the recent years, data science has seen a massive adoption because of the improvements in hardware (yes, Moore’s law still holds good) and communities building open source libraries. This has enabled a common man to become a data science practitioner.
Data science sits in a wonderful intersection of mathematics, domain knowledge and a mentality to hack; all packed up in a neat little package. It’s power is already touching all our lives and its presence will only increase as time progresses.
The 4th industrial revolution is being driven by data science and is disrupting almost every industry in every country. There are no bounds to what can be achieved with Data science. We have exciting times ahead of us.
