
From Tom Davenport’s presentation about the evolution of data skills and requirements
Just back after a few days at the Open Data Science Conference at the Hynes Center in Boston’s Back Bay. This is the second year that I attended as it fits in nicely since it offers many hands-on seminars using easily accessible tools (many free for downloads like MapR and RapidMiner) and overall the event costs are kept low. It does lead to very crowded rooms and occasionally getting shut out, but once I got the flow, then I was able to get in my seminars.
The above graphic is from Tom Davenport’s opening keynote. To a room of data science people, he was a folk hero joking that his most memorable contribution to the field was naming data the job of Data Scientist as the “The Sexiest Job of the 21st Century.” He was good at presenting the high-level overview, and I’m now also excited to see him talk again at the CIO Symposium at MIT in 3 weeks.
The three hands-on seminars that I’m looking to jump into asap were for text analytics and using R to run sentiment analysis, using census data to create visualizations, and predicting subscription churn.