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.

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