The shortage of skilled data scientists is a real and present danger across all sectors, with the biggest companies battling to secure and keep the top talent in a world that’s putting increasing value on measurable intelligence.
A few years ago, Harvard Business Review dubbed data science ‘The sexiest job in the 21st century’ and since then the call for good data scientists has grown with companies like Facebook and LinkedIn paying top dollar for the top talent. With the onset of IoT and the increasing number of devices and sensors being connected to create their own data sets, that demand is set to grow even further in the decade ahead.
We recently met David Selby, Senior Data Scientist and Master Inventor at IBM at the Strata + Hadoop Conference in London to find out what life is like in data science. David has over 50 patents to his name including integration of data mining within a parallel relational database and the use of advanced analytics for user behaviour monitoring as well as numerous patent-pending filings in the area of data analytics, CRM and optimization.
“You need to be a consummate hacker, in other words data never turns up the right way” David told us. He is responsible for designing leading edge marketing analytics, utilization of information as an asset through data consolidation, business intelligence, big data, and advanced data mining. In his role, David is responsible for driving business value from data and developing relevant technology that directly grows business opportunities.
Listen to our interview with David below:
IBM recently launched The Data Science Experience, a cloud-based tool kit for developers to get started with Apache Spark.
