by Angela Guess
John Koetsier of VentureBeat reports, “The appeal of big data has made data scientists a hot item, commanding respect and income worthy of supermodels or football stars. But perhaps a better term would be ‘data artists,’ befitting the artfulness that goes into interpreting and illustrating big datasets. Perhaps these scientists are not the Einsteins and Edisons but the Van Goghs and Picassos of the big data revolution. The current revolution in big data is inherent in the name: datasets trending to petabyte size (that’s 1 million GBs) or more. And it’s all about complexity: unstructured data, multiple datasets, and structured data, all jumbled up. (Even Facebook is looking to hire a data scientist.) So big data requires big brains and massive computing brawn.”
He goes on, “But it requires more, too, much more, according to author and data scientist Bill Franks. He’s the author of Taming the Big Data Tidal Wave and the chief analytics officer for Teradata, the data warehousing and analytics company. According to Franks, even more than size and complexity, big data is increasingly about creativity: finding interesting patterns and following them down the rabbit hole. Sometimes, nothing turns up. Other times, data artists discover wonderland. A very profitable wonderland.”
