Fueling the future of Mankind

Imagine in a world full of calm seas and fully inhabited continental shelves, a little rumble emerges. That was data science to the world of conventional information technology almost a decade back. Today this field has more to offer the world than what it could have possibly quantified the need for.

To delve deeper into what the field is as a whole, consider you are standing before a crowd of people — your consumers and vendors. And as you look at them, little pop-ups emerge in your eyes like the ones you see in a heads-up display in a Sci-Fi movie. That’s not fiction, that’s data science. People and machines all over the world are talking constantly, releasing terabytes of data as they do so. Now imagine you are one of the few that can interpret this complex language that they are subconsciously talking, while all 'muggles' hear is silence.

The advent of this field in the world stemmed from conventional IT expanding its people and resources into this new field, which means, people who were in IT a decade ago are now in the Data Science teams of their companies and that is what makes for the little coast that has been explored. In essence, a Data Scientist is a better mathematician and statistician than an IT engineer and a better IT engineer than a mathematician or statistician, and uses both as instruments to interpret the complex convolution of data in the world. With artificial intelligence and machine learning, constant advancements in the way algorithms can work are being put out there and what was once an accessory for software and marketing some years back, is today an invariable need. Consumer analytics, for example, can enlist even the simplest human tendencies like “whether a customer is going to abandon an e-commerce website without buying a product”- Little thing the human mind can overlook, analytics can perceive and present with a little bit of data science put into it to reach a concrete algorithm.

Imagine the depths that haven’t even been touched upon or explored by Data Scientists themselves, the world over. So the next time you get an alternate route on your navigation, recommendation to invest in a stock or a suggestion for that favourite shirt you have been looking up on amazon pops up on your home screen, think about your data footprint and to what depths into these little tiny specs has the world of Data Science progressed to make your life subliminally easier.

As rightly said, Data Science is not about the data but the ‘beauty lies in the eye of the beholder. This is where acumen meets analysis, cognition meets creativity, data meets decisions. The time value of data education will fetch you higher returns in the future as compared to your current portfolio.

It’s all about the time you invest in yourself. Especially in the fast-changing domain such as Data Science, it’s important to constantly expand your knowledge and enhance your skills.

By prof. Anshul Gupta, assistant professor, data science at SP Jain School of Global Management