We’re now in the midst of a golden era of data. and scientists are constantly finding news ways to harness this information with applications across health care, the environment, commerce, urban planning, finance, and more. In this week’s podcast we speak with Francesca Dominici, professor of biostatistics at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, and David C. Parkes, George F. Colony Professor and area dean for computer science at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. Together they will lead Harvard’s new Data Science Initiative, applying the theories and practices of statistics and computer science to extract useful knowledge from complex and often messy information sources. Dominici and Parkes will explain how the field of data science has grown, where it’s going, and how it will affect our lives in vast ways over the coming years.
“What is data science?” , “What is data…? .. people often think ‘numbers’ but I want to make the point that data is more than
numbers.. It might be text, it might be images, it might be ‘decisions’. … its not just quantitative, it could be more qualitative.”
We emphasize that ‘data science’ is three things coming together: methodology, the application, and the contextualization.
