What Is a Data Scientist?

  • Kenji Takeda and Liz Lyon | University of Bath, UK; Microsoft Research Connections

The term, data-scientist, is becoming prevalent in science, engineering, business, and industry. We explore how the term is used in different contexts, segments, and sectors; we examine the different variants, flavors, and interpretations and try to answer the following questions:

  • What does a data scientist really do?
  • What skills does a data scientist need? How do they acquire them?
  • What tools, technologies, and platforms are used by data scientists?
  • How can we build data scientist capacity and capability for the future?