WhatsTheBigData

I put “sexy” in the title because I’m told that the words in the title make all the difference in getting noticed on the Web. That has certainly proven true for the Harvard Business Review after it included the word “sexiest” in the title of a recent article. It even got the attention, probably for the first time ever, of Geekosystem, a website devoted to geeks:

The Harvard Business Review, a noted authority on “things that are sexy,” has declared “Data Scientist“ to be the sexiest career of the 21st century. The article reflects the burgeoning mystique of the new and pocket protector friendly gig, which we have to assume narrowly edged out things like “Chippendales dancer” and “calendar firefighter” on its way to being named the sexiest of all possible careers. Because if there’s one thing that gives a job an indefinable allure, it is everybody else being kind of unsure what it is you really do — a quality that data scientists damn near embody.

Whether employers know or don’t know what data scientists do, they have been using—in rapidly-growing numbers—the term“data scientist” in job descriptions in the past two years as Indeed.com’s data demonstrates.   

We just started to use the term “data scientist” and the demise of this new profession is already predicted? Well, at least it’s not one more “rise of the machines” prophecy; it’s the provocative title of a proposed panel for the upcoming SXSW.

The organizer of the panel, Scott Hendrickson of Gnip, has provided a useful run-down of some of the arguments for and against the possible disappearance of data scientists. Supporting the proposition are the current scarcity of data science talent and a slew of startups providing “data science as a service.” As an example of the opposition to the “democratization of algorithms,” Hendrickson quotes Cathy (Mathbabe) O’Neil who wrote recently that “if your model fails, you want to be able to figure out why it failed. The only way to do that is to know how it works to begin with. Even if it worked in a given situation, when you train on slightly different data you might run into something that throws it for a loop, and you’d better be able to figure out what that is.” In other words, machines will never have the deep understanding of the tools of data science that is required to practice data science.   Continue reading →

Data scientists are data junkies—when they see a new data set they are just naturally excited and can’t wait to explore.

Mingsheng Hong is Chief Data Scientist at Hadapt, a Boston-based startup that offers an analytical platform that integrates structured and unstructured data in one cloud-optimized system. Before joining Hadapt, Mingsheng was Field CTO for Vertica. He holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Cornell and a BSc in Computer Science from Fudan University. Mingsheng is president of NECINA and is active in St. Baldrick’s Foundation, a volunteer-driven charity that funds research to find cures for childhood cancers. I talked to Mingsheng just before he shaved his head, a visual indicator and act of solidarity expected from successful St. Baldrick’s fundraisers.

As a graduate student, were you thinking of an academic career?

At Cornell, I explored both academic and private industry career tracks. I love research and innovation, and discovered my passion for explaining ideas to people from various backgrounds and getting them excited about these ideas. While that aligns with a more academic track, in the end I decided the private sector was a better fit for me. I’m driven by the challenge of taking an idea and carrying it end-to-end, from idea to product development to sales. During graduate school, I had the opportunity to visit Microsoft for a few summers, and I got a lot of exposure to database R&D and came away with a good feel for the industry. My research work there was commercialized in SQL Server 2008 and 2012, which was very exciting.   Continue reading →