Tanya Cushman Reviewer:"Peter van de Ven I want you to close your eyes and imagine the image of a data scientist. Are you picturing it? What image comes to your mind? Okay, you may open your eyes. When people think about a data scientist, they tend to imagine a picture of a man in a lab coat who maybe hasn't come for a while, doing artificial intelligence, applying algorithms, and analyzing data to extract insights for industrial or commercial use. But in reality, The profile of a data scientist requires the skills of a polymath, of a person whose expertise spans across a significant number of different areas, of a person who embodies the entrepreneurial spirit and curiosity of Leonardo da Vinci. In 2016, Eric Smith, the former CEO of Google, said that five exabytes of data were created since the dawn of humanity until 2003, and that today we are generating the same amount of data every two days. That's a huge amount of data. But the good news is that the technology today enables us to handle, process, and analyze all that vast amount of information. With the help of artificial intelligence, of machine learning, big data is being used for a number of things. For better profiling users, for doing personalized recommendations. improving healthcare and diagnosis, for predicting political revolution, preventing crime, and even creating fine arts. It's clear that big data enhances human potential. At AlterData Analytics, we help large... Large organizations drive actionable insights from all kinds of data to make a difference. And then, when there's a social debate, like in the months after the Brexit, we can analyze the data and understand and map where the social debate happens and what communities were created. We can see how the Remainers were opposed to the Leave community, how the Media community was seated in the middle kind of neutral, how there was a technical community which were the people talking about the economic and social and political implications of the Brexit that were closer to the remainer community. We can see also other communities emerging like the Scottish, the separatist Scottish, which are closer to the tassels of the remainers, or how the US Republicans appear more in the side of the Brexit. We can also analyze and understand who were the most influential people in the debate and how the media itself was positioned and even predict what agendas will prevail. And as for a movie, we can analyze far more than what the analysts... What the critics would say, in Leonardo DiCaprio's documentary, Before the Flood, documentary to raise awareness about climate change, what we did is we captured all the photograms so that we could analyse and understand how many of them DiCaprio appears, and how many of them policymakers appear, to understand and determine which were the aspects of climate change that triggered more debate. Or we can understand as well which of the visual sequences were shared and amplified in social media. And in fashion, we can even predict trends in fashion by analyzing the photographs that people share in Instagram with hashtags such as Outfit of the Day. We collect all the hundreds of thousands of photos, then we can analyze the underlying influence of people sharing those photos because we can see who interacts with who, and then see what patterns emerge in the photos that the most influential people share. It's a paradigm shift where we used to make decisions based on intuition and guesswork. Now we can manage this on evidence. We can move to data-driven decisions. Management guru Peter Drucker said that you cannot manage what you cannot measure. Now there's no excuse. You can measure and you can manage. Without the help of artificial intelligence, machine learning and all the big data technologies, we would not be able to handle all this data revolution. But still... The most important element in driving insights out of data is what makes a data scientist irreplaceable. It's the human factor. The key to turn data into insight lies in what we can do that machines can't. Curiosity. We all have access to Google, to billions of data points in Google, but it's your curiosity what determines what you learn, what you search, and therefore also what you filter and how you discover what's relevant to you. Empathy. Empathy is the key to connect with others and to understand what other people need. Henry Ford said, If I would have asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses. Imagination is the key to visualize what doesn't exist yet. Creativity. Creativity is the key to invent. and articulate solutions to solve problems. Communications is the key to persuade, to influence, and to spread ideas that create change. And leadership is the key to step up and move all these people to action. And at the center of them all is curiosity. Because it is curiosity for emotions that drives empathy. It is curiosity for ideas that drives imagination. It is curiosity for solutions that drives creativity. It is curiosity for influencing that drives communications. And it is curiosity for results that in the end drives leadership. The most important skill of a data scientist is asking the right question to data. The curiosity of a data scientist to ask those right questions, to iterate, to understand human issues, to imagine the possibilities, to create and articulate solutions, to convey the message and the insights with the right visuals to make them actionable. Those are the key elements. that turn data into something meaningful. It's a set of skills that no artificial intelligence can match yet. It is at the intersection of technology and liberal arts where magic happens. If the Renaissance of the 14th and 17th century Was a cultural force that drove humanity out of the Middle Ages and into the modern era, the big data renaissance is already unveiling endless possibilities to push the human race forward with the power of data. It is up to us to imagine what data and machines will do for us. Remember, That a fool with a tool is still a fool. Big data is not only about technology. Big data needs big brains. Big data needs the curious brain of an artist to make a difference. Thank you. Thank you.