Saama Technologies
MATH IS MY PLAYGROUND.
AS A CHILD, I LOVED LEGOS (I STILL DO).
THE CUBE OR KAGGLE IS BUT A MERE CHALLENGE FOR ME
AND TESLA IS ONE OF MY HEROS.
I AM DRIVEN, FASCINATED BY DERIVING FACTS FROM THE UNKNOWN.
I TURN EXECUTIVES INTO DECISION SCIENCE PROFESSIONALS.
I HAVE BEEN CALLED THE NATIONS’ TOP CATCH BY MULTIPLE JOURNALS.
I FIND THE SHARPEST NEEDLES IN THE DIGITAL HAYSTACKS.
I AM THE NEXT GENERATION, TODAY.
WHO AM I?
I AM A DATA SCIENTIST.
Who is a Data Scientist?
Data scientists are experts in analytics and decision sciences, are well versed in data integration technologies, have business expertise and possess the ability to communicate effectively with decision-makers. They reside in the analytics process between the data and the answers.
The field of data science incorporates varying elements and builds on techniques and theories from many fields including math, statistics, data engineering, pattern recognition, advanced computing, visualization, uncertainly modeling, data warehousing, and high performance computing.
The Required Skills
Somewhere between a software engineer and a research scientist…is a Data Scientist.
Data scientists offer three core (often unrelated) skills important to business today:
- Programming (open source, SQL, statistics, predictive modeling and Python)
- Algorithms and statistical modeling
- Ability to communicate their findings with Analytics, in a visual manner, with business finesse.
The particular skill set that is a common denominator is how to build mathematical models of the real world. That’s why you see data scientists coming from fields as broad as computer science, astronomy, physics, applied mathematics—they come from many different backgrounds.
What do Data Scientists do?
Data Scientists drive the process of running multiple algorithms against the different data sets to identify the best ways to isolate the signal from the noise. Once the signal, or good data, is identified the data science further analyzes the information to identify the insights – the trends, the grouping of results, the outliers or the small bit of data that tells the critical piece of the story. They pull these critical bits of data and weave the story into visualizations for the end-user in order to answer the business questions. The data scientist is the human bridge that links the business user back to the data in a way that makes the data useful.
Business Leaders Want to Know ‘Why’
The field of data science is more about trying to deal with real-world data than most of applied mathematics. Mathematics asks, “How do we solve models which we understand?” Data science gets to the “why” of problem solving, and is often about problems the real world hands you without a particular model to use. It’s becoming less about mathematical statistics and more about applied statistics, and really trying to understand real-world data.”
Storytelling is essential across every line of business: All of the dashboards and color-coded charts in the world won’t matter if you can’t communicate to executives why your findings matter.
The Demand for a Data Scientist
Popular schools including Stanford, Northwestern, New York University, and The University of San Francisco are producing strong knowledge-based degrees in Analytics, Big Data Analytics, and Mathematics with Predictive Analytics to meet the growing demand data scientists.
Without a data scientist, you’ll need to staff up to prepare for the growing amounts of data to sort through and long tail chain of analytics to slice and dice your way through to get the right insights. Without this critical skill, you’ll potentially lose out to competitors who are able to invest in a data scientist which allows them to cut costs, save a lot of time getting to the answers you need, add top line revenue, and improve results across the board.
This rapidly growing crop of data scientists promises to revolutionize industries from pharma to government, healthcare to insurance. Propelled by the enormous amounts of data that today’s digital technologies have created, Data Scientists are the ring bearers of the Big Data era. Whether it is the online behavior of twitter users, tissue samples of cancer patients, purchasing habits of retail ecommerce shoppers, or criminal background information at the right time, Data scientists are sifting through the digital haystacks to quickly find the nuggets well worth their weight in gold – facts that allow you to jump past and stay ahead of the competition.
Where do I get a Data Scientist?
Companies can recruit and build a solution internally or they can outsource with an advanced data and analytics solution. [Saama’s data scientists] are experts in analytics and decision sciences, are well versed in big data end-to-end solutions, have business expertise, and possess the ability to communicate effectively with decision-makers. Saama has a team of consultants with advanced qualifications and Masters /PhD degrees in one or more of the field’s such as Statistics, Computer Science, Mathematics, Electrical & Computer Engineering, Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence, Informatics, Predictive Analytics and Data Science.
Authored By Dena Lawless