About the Focus Area

Although data science builds on knowledge from computer science, mathematics, statistics, and other disciplines, data science is a unique field.

“Data science focuses on exploiting the modern deluge of data for prediction, exploration, understanding, and intervention. It emphasizes the value and necessity of approximation and simplification; it values effective communication of the results of a data analysis and of the understanding about the world and data that we glean from it; it prioritizes an understanding of the optimization algorithms and transparently managing the inevitable tradeoff between accuracy and speed; it promotes domain-specific analyses, where data scientists and domain experts work together to balance appropriate assumptions with computationally efficient methods.” – David Blei and Padhraic Symth, “Science and Data Science,” Proceedings of the National Academies of Sciences, vol. 114, no. 33, June 2017, pp. 8689-8692.

What makes data science data science?

What is/are the driving deep question(s) of data science?

What is the role of the domain in the field of data science?

What new kinds of problems will data science be able to solve?

What new techniques will be invented that would not have come into existence if not for the marriage of computer science and statistics?

What will the field of data science look like, or be like, when the child of computer science and statistics enters its adulthood?

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