What Would a Next-Gen Data Scientist Do?

  Next-gen data scientists don’t let money blind them to the point that their models are used for unethical purposes. They seek out opportunities to solve problems of social value and they try to consider the consequences of their models.

Finally, there are ways to do good: volunteer to work on a long-term project (more than a hackathon weekend) with DataKind.

There are also ways to be transparent: Victoria Stodden is working on RunMyCode, which is all about making research open-source and replicable.

We won't step aside for a moment and let someone else highlight how important we think ethics—and vanquishing hubris—are to data sci‐ once. Professor Matthew Jones, from Columbia’s History Department, attended the course. He is an expert in the history of science, and he wrote up some of his thoughts based on the course. We’ve included them here as some very chewy food for thought avoiding rote activity.

Importance of Data science

Computational statistics and data analysis had vanquished prognostication based on older forms of intuition, gut instinct, long-term journalistic experience, and the decadent web of Washington insiders. The apparent success of the Obama team and others using quantitative prediction revealed that a new age in political analysis has been cemented.

Older forms of “expertise,” now with scare quotes, were invited to take a long-overdue retirement and to permit a new data-driven political analysis to It’s a compelling tale, with an easy and attractive bifurcation of old and new forms of knowledge. Yet good data scientists have been far more reflective about the dangers of throwing away existing domain knowledge and its experts entirely.

Data science rests on algorithms but does not reduce to these algorithms. The use of those algorithms rests fundamentally on what sociologists of science call “tacit knowledge”—practical knowledge not easily reducible to articulated rules, or perhaps impossible to reduce to rules at all. Using algorithms well is fundamentally a very human endeavor—something not particularly algorithmic.

What is the Scope of Data Science in 2019?

Career Advice

We’re not short on advice for aspiring next-gen data scientists, especially if you’ve got to this part of knowledge about data science follow data scientist certification.

After all, lots of people ask us whether they should become data Scientists, so we’re pretty used to it. We often start the advice session with two questions of our own.