THE SEXIEST JOB IN THE WORLD
By: Rob Reng
Tags: Big Data, Data Science

According to the Harvard Business Review , the humble data scientist will be the sexiest job of the 21st century. While Scarlett Johansson lookalikes may not yet be lining up for careers in data mining, there is undoubtedly a revolution unfolding.

Take 2012 for example. An outstanding Olympic Games took place. A man jumped from the stratosphere. The Middle East kept erupting. Everyone learned how to dance Gangnam style. And the digital universe generated approximately 2.8 zettabyes of data.

You might be wondering what a zettabyte is, and the answer is a trillion gigabytes. This amount of data is so astonishingly large, it is almost impossible to comprehend. It is roughly equivalent to all the words ever spoken by mankind, 600 times over!

So, that big data everyone is talking about? It really is pretty big. But what exactly is happening here?

Obviously, smartphones and devices are everywhere and sensors are on everything from fridges to freight packages, all of which are diligently generating floods of data into the cloud. In addition, we have digitised our lives. Social media has shifted conversations to a stored medium. Photos and videos, once stashed away in dusty cupboards, are now shared with the world on an extraordinary scale.

So we have a gigantic mountain of data, within which lies a wealth of insights just waiting to be unearthed. Yet an International Data Corporation study reveals that less than one per cent of this enormous data mountain is actually being analysed. Herein lie the huge opportunities to those who are prepared to invest in making sense of all this. And the people who can make the most sense of all this are those sexy data scientists, with the help of some very clever technology.

Taking on the mountain

Big data analytics is a technology-driven approach for gleaning richer, more accurate and timelier insights into customers and businesses. By processing streams of real-time data from multiple sources, enterprises can monitor emerging trends, fine-tune their strategies and jump on to new business opportunities.

The skill of the data scientist is to take two types of enterprise data: structured (in databases, created by systems) and unstructured (in documents, emails, images, videos, tweets and blog posts, created by humans), and drive actionable insights from it. The technology platform that is fast evolving as the de-facto approach to help them achieve this is Hadoop.

Hadoop is an open-source framework that enables distributed processing of large data sets on clusters of computers. Falling costs of cloud servers has meant Hadoop is cost-effective for handling extremely large data sets, and it offers massive scalability and lightning-fast speed. It can also be combined with natural language processing toolkits, so that chaotic unstructured data can be automatically analysed, understood, tagged and categorised.

Spotify, eBay, Google, Amazon, Facebook, Adobe and LinkedIn are all using Hadoop to process huge volumes of data and provide actionable insights to their businesses.

Whatever your industry, it is undoubtedly going to change as a result of the continued growth of the data mountain. In the agency world, data scientists are already a sought-after asset and will no doubt become a common role to recruit. And if they really are sexy, then our lives will be just that little bit better.