A data scientist is an exceptional person. They bring to a task a
specific collection of computer skills using a variety of tools. They
also have particularly strong intuitions about how to resolve the
whole into its components. They can then explore, visualise, analyse,
and model the components to then synthesise new understandings into a
new whole. With a desire and hunger for continually learning the data
scientist will always be on the lookout for opportunities to improve
how things are done and to change the current state of the world for
the better.
Finding all the requisite technical skills and motivation in one
person is rare and so true data scientists are scarce and the demand
for their services continues to grow as we find ourselves with more
data every day.
As these skills become critical to all human activity we will find new
platforms emerging that will support the data scientist. Platforms
that provide open and extensible support of data ingestion, data
fusion, data cleansing, data wrangling, data visualisation, data
analysis, and model building will begin to appear and will allow data
scientists to be more efficient and productive. Such frameworks will
also serve as the pathway for new data scientists into the world of
data science.
