by Angela Guess
Chau Tu writes in Science Friday, “It’s been only eight years since DJ Patil—then the data and analytics lead at LinkedIn—co-coined the term “data scientist,” but the profession has already become one of the most popular in the country. Patil has long been involved in the data industry. As a doctoral student and subsequent faculty member at the University of Maryland, he used open datasets from NOAA to help improve numerical weather forecasting. For almost two years, he was the director of strategy, analytics, and products at eBay, Inc.; he spent nearly three years at LinkedIn; and he’s written books on the culture of data and building data products. Last year, the White House declared its own support of data science by appointing Patil as its first U.S. Chief Data Scientist and as its Deputy Chief Technology Officer for Data Policy in the Office of Science and Technology Policy.”
On co-coining the term “data scientist,” DJ Patil said, “It’s good and bad. I think there’s this interesting question of, Well, what is a data scientist? Isn’t that just a scientist? Don’t scientists just use data? So what does that term even mean? You’ve had one of my co-authors, Hilary Mason, on the show, and the thing we joke about and we wrote about together, is that the number one thing about data scientists’ job description is that it’s amorphous. There’s no specific thing that you do; the work kind of embodies all these different things. You do whatever you need to do to solve a problem. If you’re building a self-driving car, who are those people who are building the self-driving car? They’re data scientists—whether they’re product managers, designers, whatever they are. They’re the people who are using these techniques and ideas from economics, from statistics, from machine-learning, from artificial intelligence, from all these disciplines to specifically make it work, to make the car drive in a way that keeps you safe and others safe as well. The best data scientists have one thing in common: unbelievable curiosity.”
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