Data Scientist: 6 Definitions

From Simon Rogers, “What is a Data Scientist?”:

“Someone who can bridge the raw data and the analysis – and make it accessible. It’s a democratising role; by bringing the data to the people, you make the world just a little bit better.”–Simon Rogers

“A data scientist is that unique blend of skills that can both unlock the insights of data and tell a fantastic story via the data.”–DJ Patil

“A data scientist is someone who blends, math, algorithms, and an understanding of human behavior with the ability to hack systems together to get answers to interesting human questions from data.”–Hilary Mason

“A data scientist is a rare hybrid, a computer scientist with the programming abilities to build software to scrape, combine, and manage data from a variety of sources and a statistican who knows how to derive insights from the information within. S/he combines the skills to create new protoypes with the creativity and thoroughness to ask and answer the deepest questions about the data and what secrets it holds”–Jake Porway

“The four qualities of a great data scientist are creativity, tenacity, curiosity, and deep technical skills. They use skills in data gathering and data munging, visualization, machine learning, and computer programming to make data driven decisions and data driven products. They prefer to let the data do the talking.”–Jeremy Howard

“By definition all scientists are data scientists. In my opinion, they are half hacker, half analyst, they use data to build products and find insights. It’s Columbus meet Columbo – starry eyed explorers and skeptical detectives.”–Monica Rogati

About GilPress

I'm Managing Partner at gPress, a marketing, publishing, research and education consultancy. Also a Senior Contributor forbes.com/sites/gilpress/. Previously, I held senior marketing and research management positions at NORC, DEC and EMC. Most recently, I was Senior Director, Thought Leadership Marketing at EMC, where I launched the Big Data conversation with the “How Much Information?” study (2000 with UC Berkeley) and the Digital Universe study (2007 with IDC). Twitter: @GilPress
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