Big Data: Business, Technology, Education, and Science: Big Data (Ubiquity symposium)

The emergence of big data underlies one of the major global and local socio-political-economic revolutions of the twenty-first century. However, the important lesson is not that the data are big, but that all data produced by humans and nature are becoming digital [1]. Today all human activity leaves a digital trace that, by accident or design, can contain extremely valuable latent information. A huge new technology-enabled business called data science is sweeping the globe to address practical problems and exploit the immense latent commercial and social value of digital data. Data science combines information technology and computational techniques with individual and collective human intelligence. This article considers data science from its applications in the private and public sectors, where a strong demand for qualified practitioners has stimulated the creation of new educational programs by universities and commercial organizations. Job advertisements for data scientist demand not only technical skills and knowledge, but also highlight soft skills including personal drive, the ability to learn quickly in a self-directed way and, above all, interpersonal skills and teamwork. Data science lies at the intersection of business applications, technology and computational problem solving techniques, and individual and collective human problem-solving intelligence. There are many practical problems that data science can solve today, but some require new science to lay the foundations for future solutions. The fast moving commercial world of data science and engineering will have an increasing impact on the social world in the short term of a decade or so, but there are many areas where the business of data science will stall without new scientific knowledge and understanding.