Data Science, the Good, the Bad, and the… Future

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What is data science?

How often do you think you’re touched by data science in some form or another? Finding your way to this article likely involved a whole bunch of data science (whooaa). To simplify things a bit, I’ll explain what data science means to me.

“Data Science is the art of applying scientific methods of analysis to any kind of data so that we can unlock important information.”

That’s a mouthful. If we unpack that, all data science really means is to answer questions by using math and science to go through data that’s too much for our brains to process.

Data Science covers…

  • Machine learning
  • Data visualization
  • Predictive analysis
  • Voice assistants

… and all the buzzwords we hear today, like artificial intelligence, deep learning, etc.

To finish my thought on data science being used to find this article, I’ll ask you to think of the steps you used to get here. For the sake of this explanation, let’s assume that most of you were online looking at pictures of kittens and puppies when you suddenly came across a fancy word related to data science and wanted to know what it was all about. You turned to Google hoping to find the meaning of it all, and you typed “What is *fill in your data science related buzzword*.”

You would have noticed that Google was kind enough to offer suggestions to refine your search terms – that’s predictive text generation. Once the search results came up, you would have noticed a box on the right that summarizes your search results – that’s Google’s knowledge graph. Using insights from SEO (Search Engine Optimization) I’m able to make sure my article reaches you easily, which is a good data science use case in and of itself. All of these are tiny ways that data science is involved in the things we do every day.

To be clear, going forward I’m going to use data science as an umbrella term that covers artificial intelligence, deep learning and anything else you might hear that’s relevant to data and science.

Positives: astrophysics, biology, and sports

Data science made a huge positive impact on the way technology influences our lives. Some of these impacts have been nice and some have been otherwise. *looks at Facebook* But, technology can’t inherently be good or bad, technology is… technology. It’s the way we use it that has good or bad outcomes.

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