Vishnu U

Data Science

VISHNU U | January 12, 2022

The industry of Data Science has been popular since a decade or so. The aim and workflow of the field has undergone a lot of changes since then. From basic reporting and analytics to predictive and cognitive analytics, data science revolutionized the concept of “Computers that can think”. As of today, Data Science and its subfields are one of the greatest in demand and has a great competition in the industry. Apart from improving businesses, Analytics has proved its capability in various sectors and applications. This has changed the overall structure of the field of Data Science and the opportunities available. The large amount of data and its wide scope comes with plenty of various opportunities and developments. AI, AI everywhere AI started as a boom few years back wherein it saw great potential, but now it’s everywhere. From Research Labs to Education, Healthcare and even in personal devices, AI has taken up various forms, solving many problems and improving various products and services. Even now, experts states that the full potential of AI is not completely utilised and is expected to be used in a few years’ time. The wide use of Artificial Intelligence has motivated many start-ups to focus on the use of AI to build solutions and products. Industries at all scales have taken a move to include AI in their services / products to increase efficiency through intelligent behaviour. The “Mimicabilty” of human brain functionality comes with great potential – Namely Automation and Optimization of various tasks. Data Centric is the trend With a large amount of data generated daily on servers, there comes a need of shifting from model-centric to data-centric. Let us have a glimpse into what each approach means. In model-centric approach, data is kept constant while the model is tweaked to adjust to the data and get a good result. What’s the drawback of this? Not performing good on real world data. But, then why the model gave good results? That is because, model completely got adjusted to the data you gave instead of generalizing to the real-world problem. This issue came in the recent past, thus the trend of Data-centric came in. Experts like Andrew Ng often hosts talks and campaigns to shift the focus on ML Practitioners and Industries to Data rather than model. According to him, “data is like food for the model”. Data Engineers on Rise As a trailing topic to the previous one, Data Engineers will have a good rise in the coming future. As seen before, there is a copious amount of existing data and is getting generated at an un-imaginable rate. This might sound good since, “more is good” for analytics, but comes with the disadvantage of difficulty in ensuring data quality. As more data comes in, maintaining quality can be challenging. One reality here is that not all times a cloud pipeline can be used to ensure data quality and automated cleaning. There are times where raw data is logged as it is. This calls for more data engineers to perform cleaning and tuning of data to ensure it meets quality standards. With the oncoming of Data-Centric AI approach, this will have a great hype in the coming recent time. And speaking from the Industry Point of View, Data is one of the core part of Data Science and has no replacement. No good data, no good results and the crash of Data Science. “Artificial” becoming more on the point for AI AI started as a research topic long back. It all started like a big-bang – Basic linear regression to Neural Networks. The latest AI algorithms can now see like a human (Computer Vision), speak like a human (Natural Language Processing) and assist in decision making (Inferencing using Models). The newer models are much more advanced that AI seems to be – Natural Language Processing algorithms can now carry out tasks on speaking, predict a sentence and even tell what sentiment it has. Computer Vision Algorithms are now assisting doctors to detect defects and diseases through X-rays and MRI images. This all points to the immense capability in the field of AI. In future it is predicted that setting up an AI system will be equivalent to setting up the mind of a human being – A situation called singularity. More opportunities coming up As seen previously, there are a lot of opportunities coming up in Data Science field. With its vast number of applications in every sector, there are a lot of openings coming up. Start-ups and developed industries are now shifting to AI solutions because of its dynamic nature and intelligent decision-making capability. The number of jobs in Data Science is expected to rise in the coming years. Especially Post COVID, organizations experienced a surge in various technologies, out of which Data Science is one of the major fields. Data Science and Artificial Intelligence is one of the most demanded fields for research to happen. Aspiring researchers have a good demand in the AI and ML field. Tech giants have marked their presence in improving AI algorithms, making the systems more efficient and “Intelligent”. Artificial General Intelligence is one of the applications of AI which is focused on varied problem solving rather than a restricted problem domain and is expected to bring a significant change in the AI focused problem solving.