From Policy by the Numbers: Data for sound policymaking from Google and friends
DataEDGE: A conversation about the future of data science
By Heather Ford
With all the hype around “Big Data” lately, you may be inclined to shrug it off as a business fad. But there is more to it than a buzzword. Data science is emerging as a new field, changing the ways that companies get to know their customers, governments their citizens, and relief organizations their constituents. It is a field which will demand entirely new skill sets and information professionals trained to collect, curate, combine, and analyze massive amounts of data....
The information field is the right place for data scientists to learn how to apply statistical methods to real world social data online. But data science is so often driven only by statisticians, computer scientists and mathematicians. By bringing social scientists and information professionals into the mix, we hope to shape a more holistic future for data science. Since the data is multidisciplinary, so, too, should the field dedicated to making sense of it.
To explore such opportunities, the UC Berkeley School of Information’s upcoming DataEDGE conference not only presents the thinking of some of the country’s top statisticians and computer scientists, but brings into the conversation ethnographers, whose perspectives can help us understand what broader research and analytics fields need to consider as they define the roles and responsibilities of data science....