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As Big Data Plateaus, Data Science Education Grows
gthuang88 writes: Even as the hype around big data has died down, opportunities for data scientists are expanding. Johns Hopkins, NYU, and MIT are among the schools offering courses in data science, and IBM and other big companies are investing heavily in training programs. Now a startup called DataCamp has raised $1 million to expand online courses in R programming, Apache Spark, and other topics. The deal speaks to the opportunity that venture capitalists see in training the next generation of data scientists and business analysts. It also shows online education is specializing beyond platforms like Codecademy, Coursera, and Udacity.
Much more an engineering discipline than a science.
"Data Science"? Why the fuck isn't it just called "Statistics", like it has been for centuries?
WTF and when i click the link nothing happens. Also when I do a search from the page of a single story and not the front page nothing happens except that single story just reloading. I feel like there's literally no one left at Slashdot offices just a bunch of Dice shmucks who check in once a week to fuck things up at this site little by little. After Beta failed they just fired everyone and decided to just come in every now and then and ruin the classic UI slowly enough the resistance is too small to cause a big enough uproar. Dice, you suck.
The issue is that if you massage the numbers hard enough they'll say whatever you want. And often what is being done to them is so complicated that it is hard for anyone that isn't very familiar with the specific algorithms to even know what happened.
A big issue here is that it is very hard to audit this sort of science and if you are inclined to sensationalize your paper or make it appear more interesting than it would otherwise... it doesn't appear to be hard to do.
What I hope comes out of this education is clever young people that will hold their peers to reasonable standards and know the math well enough to spot nonsense when they see it.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
If a field has the word "science" in the title, it's probably not science.
Is it just me or does the title read like a scholarship from Pfizer?
I agree, and think you articulated it well. There is too much abuse of data, often but not always unintentional. Better education in how to work with data should be a good thing. Even in base curricula, not just science.
There's no point in learning R if you don't have a solid background in statistics.
" IBM... ...investing heavily in training programs"
Forgive my cynicism, but that doesn't sound like the IBM I know.
Fortunately then for me that I graduated in "Informatics", not in "Computer Science". Of course, all you people in the English-speaking countries are screwed...
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
I say it every time... Data Scientists are this bubble's Web Masters.
While I think this has changed over time, initially I think some statisticians were suspicious of techniques coming out of computer science, e.g. SVMs. And still, machine learning is a rather niche field of statistics that requires a fluency in CS that many statisticians don't have (or need). Check out this discussion.
Of course there are some statisticians who are also good CS people (think Trevor Hastie and Rob Tibshirani). And a lot of stats people have great domain knowledge in their areas. But I think "data science" is supposed to be the combination of stats, CS, practical programming ability (e.g., cleaning and manipulating large datasets, which is definitely not part of traditional CS or stats education), ability to communicate results effectively, maybe throw in some visualization, knowledge of how to query databases, and domain knowledge to interpret what data mean. Also, some types of data (e.g. text with the aim of NLP) are pretty infrequently touched upon in stats education.
That said, I get the sense that a lot of places looking for "data scientists" are actually just looking for business intelligence people.
"Anyone who [rips a CD] is probably engaging in copyright infringement." - David O. Carson
It's catchy and bright, if one's not uptight,
To catch up on news with a poetical muse.
No?
(crickets)
(goes away and sulks in corner)
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Yes, and if America can produce enough data scientists, you don't have to H1B-hire SAP "consultants" (shoot me please for saying that) from India.
It's a win(Americans)-lose(SAP(German company))-lose(Indian consultants) situation. :)
Just another example of yesterday's hot skill becoming today's commodity skill with a glut of "coders" who can do it.
I actually did the Coursera things from JHU (auditing Stanford, eyeballing U of I) because I wanted to do things w/ text cheaply (not NLP necessarily, textual analysis dates to either the Babylonian Captivity or the Council of Nicea in 325 a.d., or maybe earlier.)
Big strength of the online courses was you got to see what languages people are using. JHU it was R, Stanford had Octave, UofI had no programming, though a few in the forums were swapping Java/scala/Python.
While bogus data stuff flourishes, especially in politics, I was offered a job when I called up my local police department, asking for crime stats to use in a final project, and they were very aggressive in trying to get me, so I'm not sure the hype has gone out quite yet.