Data scientists: a perfect combination of hackers and data analysts

The time for data scientist Shinton! But what exactly is a data scientist? What skills do data scientists need? Why are they different?

The advent of the large data age has driven the growth of data, bandwidth, and processing power exponentially levels. Nowadays, the new field of data science has aroused great interest. "The data is crude, but oil needs to be refined before it can be used," says Amazon's former chief scientist.

Today, organizations of all sizes are trying to explore how to dig out valuable information from large data. Data scientists have the ability to dig "gold" from big data and use it to predict trends in a wide range of mobile device data, social media streaming data, medical imaging, smart grids, and so on, with great commercial value. In the next 5 years there will be a shortage of data scientists in this field. This also brings more job opportunities.

The McKinsey report noted strong growth in big data last year. McKinsey also predicts that in the next 6 years, the United States alone may face a lack of 140,000 to 190,000 people with in-depth analysis of data capabilities, but also have the ability to analyze large data and make effective decisions for enterprises, managers and analysts have a gap of 1.5 million people.

David Menninger, an analyst at Ventana Research, points out that a recent survey by his company showed that three-fourths of 169 executives said the lack of technical staff was an important factor in the company's efforts to tackle big data challenges.

More than 2000 people at the Strata data conference in California last week discussed how to deal with big data. Companies such as Google, Facebook and LinkedIn are making huge profits by tapping into valuable information.

Google's HAL Varian says data scientists will turn into sexy jobs over the next 10 years, and many people think I'm joking, looking back, in the 1990s who would have guessed that computer engineers would be sexy jobs.

Former LinkedIn data scientist DJ Patil says data scientists have unique skills. Bitly's chief scientist, Hilary Mason, expressed the same view, saying that data scientists are people who combine mathematics and algorithms and look for answers to questions from large numbers. Monica Rogati, the current chief data scientist at LinkedIn, thinks data scientists are a mix of hackers and analysts who discover nature through data.

Jake Porway, a member of the New York Times Research and Development lab, says data scientists are definitely a rare versatile. In addition to the ability to program, data scientists need to manage data from a variety of sources and use statistics to unearth information that resides inside.

Kaggle president and chief scientist Jeremy Howard believes that a great data scientist should have four qualities of innovation, tenacity, curiosity and deep technology. Data scientists with data collection, data rewriting, visualization, machine learning, computer programming, and other technologies make data-driven decisions and lead products. They prefer to talk with data.

The above brings together a number of definitions of data scientists. But what do you think is a data scientist? How would you define them? Finally, EMC gives them a map of the data scientists. (Li/compiling)

(Responsible editor: The good of the Legacy)