The online Forbes has an interesting post by Dan Woods, interviewing Steven Hillion, VP of Analytics at EMC Greenplum, asking him what makes for the best data scientists? Data science is a new field, to which Hillion attests:
“I’m sure in 30 years’ time, there will be lots and lots of degrees in data science and that’s where [data scientists will] come from, but right now it’s coming from all these different buckets,” Hillion says.
And, just as the early days of computing were born in the garages of Silicon Valley do-it-yourself-ers, data science is likely to develop first in an ad-hoc, hands-on way.
Data science is becoming a real discipline, one where an engineering approach will become commonplace. This will eventually take over from the ad-hoc approaches that currently tackle the easy problems, and leave the hard and nearly impossible problems unaffected (I wrote about the three different types of data science problems here…).
Read the Hillion interview here.
