From the Big Data Forum
Data Scientists Move Big Data Beyond the Sizzle
By Peter Fretty
There is always a lot of talk about how big data helps organizations enhance market penetration and make financial decisions - most likely because these applications have sizzle and garner top down attention. However, great things happen when businesses fully commit to leveraging big data from improving processes in traditional industries as well.
General Electric, for example, is using embedded sensors and controllers to instrument, monitor, analyze, and optimize the functioning of industrial machines wind turbines, MRIs, and aircraft engines. “They see huge efficiencies in the application of big data tools for what they call the industrial Internet,” says AnnaLee Saxenian, dean of UC Berkeley’s I School, [which offers a] master’s in information and data sciences.
However, if an organization commits to big data without leveraging the skills of a data scientist it does not do the journey justice, explains Saxenian. “Businesses need a data scientist, or even a team of data scientists, because working with, and learning from data at scale is not just an IT challenge,” she says. “The role of the data scientist is to generate value by analyzing the organizations' data including traditional structured data and the more complex data that is generated from sources such as sensor networks, web click streams, point of sale transactions, mobile devices, etc.”...