Strata New York 2011: John Rauser, "What is a Career in Big Data?"

Quantitative Engineer? Business Intelligence Analyst? Data Scientist? The data deluge has come upon us so quickly that we don't even know what to call ourselves, much less how to make a career of working with data. This talk examines the critical traits that lead to success by looking back to what may be the first act of data science.

John Rauser

Amazon

John has been extracting value from large datasets for over 15 years at companies ranging from hedge funds to small data-driven startups to amazon.com. He has deep experience in machine learning, data visualization, website performance and real-time fault analysis. An empiricist at heart, John's optimism and can-do attitude make "Just do the experiment!" his favorite call to arms.

• Category

  Science & Technology

[QQQonigiri]

Enlightening! thank you very much.

[doomsuckle]

I'm going to go with Johannes Kepler being the first data scientist... :) He derived the periodicity of the moon long before Mayer.

[mygenericacnt]

In essence his talk could be summarized as follows: Big Data = Programming + Statistics

But nothing about data management! What happened to the "Big" part?

[mygenericacnt]

What he calls "Applied Math" could be misleading. I have never heard of ANY institution classifying their Statistics department/program under that banner. Applied Math refers to fields like fluid mechanics, differential equations, possibly numerical analysis, essentially engineering mathematics but never Statistics.

[Jiunjiun Ma]

Excellent talk. Though I would argue Johannes Kepler (1571-1630) was the first data scientist instead of Tobias Mayer.

[vaXzine]

Thee Great VVork in /\cktion. Well spoken, John. (((o)))

[Tao Chen]

Like it

[Megan Squire]

Very helpful video. I will definitely show this to my intro 100 level data science students (the course is Data Science and Visualization) at Elon University. I love the tie-ins to astronomy and writing! This is a slam dunk for General Studies.

[Andrew Cox]

Systems Engineering is similar to a Data Scientist

[Roberto Bruno Martins]

My take: after a year or two of this "data scientist" hype, some companies will figure out how to do a decent enough job of it with a team of people, each bringing a different part of the needed skills. In the end, it's not that you need all these skills in a single person - you can have a team with each skill, and add someone with a good communication ability to help them communicate with each other.