The major movements just described above have practically started a parallel movement in the field of data science, which has caught the public attention in the last few years and continues to storm the online hangouts. Gary King, a Harvard statistician has described the data science movement as a revolution in a 2012 edition of the New York Times. He says, We’re really just getting under way. But the march of quantification, made possible by enormous new sources of data, will sweep through academia, business, and government. There is no area that is going to be untouched.
Data science as a field of opportunity
According to Flowing Data, data scientist is a term that ranks very high on search engines overtaking the term statistician in December 2013. Even Google trends have shown similar preferences for the term data analyst or other data science-related terms throughout 2013. This trend seems to be snowballing.
Data science, as is apparent from current online search trends, is the field of the present and future. This unique field of study enables organizations to convert their data into meaningful intelligence for competitive advantages. Industry sectors like health, finance, insurance, and non-business sectors like government or education all depend on big data analytics for improved performance. Thus data science teams will gain increasing importance in this emerging data economy. Data science, combined with the predictive power of statistics will separate the winners from the losers in tomorrow’s economy.
Chris Beaumont, a scientific software engineer at Harvard’s Center for Astrophysics, says:
On the one hand, data is increasingly plentiful and easy to store, transfer, and analyze, Businesses now save details about every transaction and promotion. Online companies can track detailed browsing habits of their users. This presents an opportunity to create and test hypotheses about how to operate more effectively. On the other hand, this is an increasingly technical task, requiring skills in statistics, computer science, and communication.