January 28th, Day 2
Today Big Data has become foundational to nearly every industry on earth including retail, healthcare, manufacturing, telecommunications, energy, financial services, tourism, advertising, entertainment, and government. As Big Data has become ubiquitous, the need for data scientists has grown exponentially, with demand far outpacing supply. However, the educational infrastructure, for the most part, is not presently set up to produce the kind of data scientists needed by most industries: few academic data science programs exist, and those that do predominantly teach rote memorization of data analysis techniques rather than deeper problem-solving skills. In this talk, I describe how we need to train the workforce differently to set both employees and businesses up for success in the new Era of Big Data.