Data Scientists; scientists or magicians?

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Creating Exceptional Experiences

Adi Andrei has more than 20 years of experience building real-world intelligent systems for NASA, Phillips, Unilever, British Gas, Sixt and others. He is an expert in Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence and Process Optimisation and has become a thought-leader in Data Science, known especially by his two Patents and three Certificates of Recognition for contributions to science from NASA. Despite his endless achievements in the field, Adi describes the mystery involved in Data Science and how it should be seen, by its human face.

The human race did not stop evolving when it reached homo sapiens. Even though physically we may be identical to our ancestors from 200,000 years ago, when we look back at how much our view of the world and ourselves has changed; even in the last few millennia, there is no doubt that, as a group, we are going through a continual process of evolution in awareness of our world and of ourselves.

This is reflected in our way of life, and especially nowadays in the technologies we are using.

Everything we do in Data Science is not new. It has been done in different ways since the 50s in fields like operations research, industrial engineering, statistics, and artificial intelligence.

What is new is that we have reached a point in time where we produce more data in a day than we had done in the whole of humanities history before. But data by itself cannot directly be used; we need to make sense of it, to understand what it means. The concept of Data Science emerged as a way to define this need and the tools and technologies used to address it.

As a profession, it has appeared in a point of time in our evolution when we are moving into a new level of awareness and it is bringing with it new concepts.

Data Science is as mystical as you can get in an everyday business environment and Data Scientists are sometimes being seen as magicians and revered almost as a new kind of priesthood.

For full access to Adi's interviews alongside our other features and research. Download our white paper 'Identifying the Human Face of Data Science' below.