21 Thought-Leader Professors in Data Science

On big data’s impact on our lives: “Exploring data can be revealing. However, big data is not so good for decision-making. We have asked executives to look back at important decisions to see how much more data about the past would have helped, versus better judgements about the future. We get about 30% from past data and 70% from better judgements. Also, for big decisions it may be more important to adapt well and quickly as the future unfolds. So good data about the present and near past may loom in importance. Analysis of decision can direct data searches to the most beneficial areas. Of course, sometimes just playing with the data can produce valuable insights, but that is serendipity.”

Recommendation for learning about big data: “Udacity has a data science track built by industry. Leading companies like Cloudera, Facebook, and MongoDB have contributed courses. Learn from the leading experts in the world. All content is accessible for free, and every student can sign up for our classes.”

On big data and how it touches our lives: “The impacts of big data are currently visible in the worlds of social media, technology, advertising and marketing, and finance. Big data is also many science and engineering fields like physics, biology, and astronomy. It will increasingly be visible in in health care, schools, government, and in a wide range of older industries, from autos to aerospace. Virtually every organization will want to be able to work with their data.Big data is working behind the scenes when we surf the web, use social media, and even email–whether on our mobile devices or computers. Big data is being used in our financial transactions and in our cars. It is really widespread–and soon will become ubiquitous.”

On big data’s largest impact on our lives: “Today, more and more companies collect and use data to provide better services to their users (e.g., Amazon), improve safety (e.g., Boeing), improve efficiency (e.g., General Electric, PG&E), detect fraud (e.g., Paypal), and, for better or worse, optimize ad targeting. In the future, we will continue to see improvements in all these areas, and, in addition, we will see great strides in new areas, such as medicine (e.g., cancer genomics), energy conservation, and environment protection.”

On big data’s largest impact: “In recent years, big data was finding a lot of small uses, such as figuring out which pop-up ad to show you on a web page. More recently, it has been used to find efficiencies in business processes, which has a lot of impact in the economy. Big data also plays a role in national security, of course. I don’t think it has yet had tremendous impact on the most important decisions companies and our society makes, but it has the potential to and it should. For example, the debate on healthcare reform involved a lot of conjecture on a wide range of issues about what the likely impacts would be from various changes to the system. Answers to a lot of the questions that were asked or should have been asked might have been found in the existing data covering the experience of many millions of Americans. This would have been possible if enough of the circumstances of each individual case were encoded and analysts were able to extract and compare all the micro experiments of policy variations that happen every day. I would like to see the methods of decision analysis in particular used as a front end to large policy and strategic decisions that would provide a framework for identifying and incorporating the most valuable information to extract from the sea of data.”

Recommendation for learning more about big data: “Some good resources for learning about big data can be found in a proposed data science curriculum that I developed along with the eScience Institute. These are the key skills that market research and scientific experience have taught us are critical to data-intensive science. We are also currently developing big data PhD tracks across multiple departments in the University of Washington.”

On how big data is improving science: “We’ve started to collaborate with scientists on the UW campus looking at their data management challenges from a database perspective. Existing tools are failing them, so they need new tools to help them manage their increasingly large datasets and be successful at doing their science.”