Tag: data science

Towards Data Science

With the gradual increase in data day by day, the need for its storage also grew. This was a big challenge in front of the enterprise industries until 2010. The prime objective was to build a framework and solution to store data. This is where Data Science came to the rescue.

Today, in this article we’ll get a sneak peak into Data Science and its related infos and probably by the end of this article, you will be able to understand what Data Science is and its role in extracting meaningful insights from the complex and large sets of data. 

What is Data Science?

Data science is the field of study that integrates domain expertise, programming skills, and knowledge of mathematics and statistics to extract meaningful insights from data.

It can also be defined as the process of using algorithms, methods and systems to extract knowledge and insights from structured and unstructured data. It is a blend of various tools, algorithms, and machine learning principles with the goal to discover hidden patterns from the raw data.

Who is a Data Scientist?

In the most simple term, a Data Scientist is one who knows the art of Data Science. Data scientists are the ones who crack complex data problems with their strong expertise in certain scientific and mathematical disciplines. They draw a lot of information from the scientific fields and applications whether it is statistics or mathematics and apply it to the raw data to generate useful insights.

Why Data Science is Important?

Data Science is important in order to generate maximum value from a raw set of data for any business. The insights that a data scientists generates is very useful to drive business decisions and take actions intended to achieve business goals.

The Pillars of Data Science

Although there are numerous skills and expertise that are highly desirable in Data Science, but these are the four major areas in my opinion :

  • Business/Domain
  • Mathematics (Particularly Stats and Probability)
  • Computer Science
  • Communication Skills

Data Scientist vs Data Analyst vs Data Engineers

Data Analyst
Data Analyst is the one who analyzes numeric data and uses it to help companies make better decisions.

Data Engineer
The job of a Data Engineer is to prepare data.

Data Scientist
The Data Sceintist analyzes and interprets complex data.

Is it worth to go with Data Science in 2021 ?

According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, there will be a tremendous growth in the data science field which will lead to an increase in the number of jobs by about 28% through 2026. If we convert this 28 % in numbers then it will be roughly 11.5 million new jobs in the field.

And reasons that make favour Data Science as a very good career option are the high demand for Data Scientist while the supply is still low. Also there is lack of competition for these jobs in comparison to the other trending job options. These factors combined together makes this field a very lucrative and smooth option as a career path.

Why should we care about our privacy?

Privacy in general terms is the right to be left alone or freedom from interference or intrusion. In terms of the internet, privacy is the right to have some control over how your personal information is collected and used.

More technical innovation gives way to more efficient and advanced technologies. In recent years the information has become the most important component to cultivate this innovation. As many new people are coming on the internet and the amount of information being shared is increased manifold. Every organization or individual is entering the realm of the digital world and data is the entity of this world. Data is also very essential to understand a user or a customer or a client but sometimes there is no limit to the amount of data that an internet corporation is willing to extract. Somewhere there has to be a line that needs to be drawn. In recent years there have been many issues regarding the privacy policy of many tech corporations. Facebook has been in controversy much time. Recently Whatsapp’s privacy policy also raised many questions, then in an ironic move Whatsapp raised the question of privacy by suing the government regarding the new Information technology rules. But this is just the tip of the iceberg and numerous other aspects get overlooked. First, we will need to understand what this privacy means for us as individuals. Only then we can clearly determine the relevance of these rapidly changing developments in this subject.  

“Arguing that you don’t care about the right to privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different than saying you don’t care about free speech because you have nothing to say.”

-Edward Snowden

It’s not that privacy means that there is something to hide; rather privacy is having things you don’t want to show. For instance, people would not like to post their Bank account online or Bank statements. People would also not like to have a public camera inside their homes. Similarly, there are some things that an individual would not like to share online. Privacy can provide secrecy, but there is more to it. Privacy also provides autonomy and therefore freedom to an individual. Well, there is even more to privacy than the freedom that many people do not realize which is that when we think we’re being watched, we make behavior choices that we believe other people want us to make.  Humans intrinsically like to avoid societal condemnation and perception of whether or not we are in private changes the way we behave. This indicates the benefit that a state can have with surveillance and can lead to a conformist population.

As it is stated by many that data is the oil and for many tech organizations it truly is. We can witness this with the various technological corporations that rely upon user data including Facebook, Google, Amazon etc. But Even Smartphone manufacturers like Xiaomi have realized the lucrative benefits of collecting and selling user data. For these companies, our data is money and they earn billions of dollars with this data. Both the private tech giants have clauses in their privacy policy that allows government agencies and third parties to access the data. The data that gets uploaded on the internet never gets deleted and stays there forever. What we have to realize is that even if the information seems futile today, it may have an importance tomorrow. In conclusion, privacy is not a trivial issue and people will have to understand its importance until it’s too late.

References:

Front end and back end services of server less computing:

 

Photo by luis gomes on Pexels.com

The marketing term ‘Server less” refers to a new generation of platform –as-a-service offerings by major cloud providers. Here the infrastructure provider takes responsibility for receiving client requests and responding to them, capacity planning, task scheduling and operational monitoring. These new services were first introduced by Amazon Web Services (AWS) Lambda. Here the application developers are no longer in the ‘server’ process that listens to TCP socket. That means usage is billed only when an application actively processes events, not when it is waiting .This, in effect, means that application idle time is free. Server less computing can be viewed as containerization operated at a scale where the optimization of resource usage can be done by the infrastructure provider, across all customers, rather than managed by a particular customer within their own deployment. Here the service providers provides several distributed authentication and authorization mechanisms to support the untrusted requests coming from client applications. Another benefit is in AWS lambda the function can use streaming data APIs and work with significantly lower memory limit.