Hossein Najafi, PhD, gave an overview about data science field and the UW-RF program. UW-RF is the only school in the UW system that offers at data science undergraduate degree. Data science is a relatively new – but huge – field of study. It is emerging now for three reasons: data volume, computational power, and advancements in machine learning.
 
Najafi touched on aspects of data volume, computational power and advancements in machine learning (AKA artificial intelligence or “AI.”)
 
Hossein Najafi, PhD, Data Science said that data science is really “finding the needle in the haystack.” A data scientist is the person who has the skill set to go and look at data through algorithms and come up with information. (Without interpretation, the data is meaningless.)

Data science is a relatively new – but huge – field of study. It is emerging now for three reasons: data volume, computational power, and advancements in machine learning.

Data volume: Over the past two years, we have produced more data in the entire history of humanity – and that data is readily available. As an example, as recently as ten years ago, if you wanted to put together a research paper on predicting tornadoes, you would have had to “dig deep” for that data; now that data is only a Google search away.

Computational power: You have amazing computational power in your own personal devices; you no longer need a computer to compute, instead going to Amazon to secure a “CPU in the cloud.” As your needs grow, you can grow the size of your cloud, and you no longer need to have your own engineers to make this happen.

Advancements in machine learning (AKA artificial intelligence or “AI”): The artificial intelligence powers of the iPhone X are something not even data scientists imagined ten years ago. Every time you talk to Siri, you are using AI. Every time Amazon suggests items to you, you are using AI. Google is now sophisticated enough that it can annotate images; it can take a photo of two boys playing at a beach and label it “two boys playing at the beach.”

AI applications include facial recognition, autonomous vehicles, Google ads, personal assistants, filtering algorithms/news feeds (including applications to try to identify “fake news”), recommendation engines, optical character recognition, political campaigns, predictive policing and surveillance systems.

We should not underestimate the impact that data science will have on our lives. Think about how much has changed in the past 20 years, when the internet was still relatively new; the change over the next 20 years with the impact of data science will be much more significant.

“Data scientist” is now considered to be the #1 job in America, and graduates are in high demand. IBM projects 2.7 million data science jobs by 2020; the average salary for these jobs is $113K nationally and $93K in our region. To be a good data scientist, you need three things: (1) an appetite for problem solving and logical thinking, (2) an appetite for statistics and math, and (3) an interest in something else. That “something else” can be anything, it’s just important that you have an interest in an area outside of data scientist. If you know a student or child with an interest in these three areas, you will be doing them a favor by encouraging them to consider data science. It is not only a field with great opportunity, but also one filled with great innovation.

UW-RF is the only school in the UW system that offers at data science undergraduate degree. The program started last fall; they have 45 students in the program. Core elements of the program include computer science and math, with options in business, finance, accounting, management, marketing, economics, GIS, etc. One of the biggest challenges with the undergraduate program is that prospective students don’t yet know about it.

Learn more about the UW-RF data science degree program at https://www.uwrf.edu/CBE/Programs/Data-Science-Degree.cfm.