Data is the new fuel
By: Hafsa Farooq
Tags: Covid 19 Data, Data Is The New Oil, Data Privacy, Data Science, Data

With the buzz words like ‘Artificial Intelligence’, ‘Machine learning’, ‘Big data’, and ‘Robotics’ creating an uproar and excitement in the digital market today, one should essentially ponder over what is so cool about data! Antonio Neri, President of Hewlett Packard Enterprise was famously quoted as saying-

“We live in an incredible time — every business has been disrupted by the digital transformation. The core of that transformation is the explosion of the data we are creating. We call data as the new currency.”

Data has been called the new oil, the new gold, considering the effect it can have on the economical statistics of the world. You must have heard it that humans produce 2.5 quintillion bytes of data every day. In fact, the statistics show that on daily basis Instagram handles 95 million photos and videos being shared on its platform. About 306.4 billion emails are sent and 5 million Tweets are made each day. Facebook alone has a daily 350 million photos upload. It generates 4 petabytes of data per day!

Photo by William Iven on Unsplash

These aren’t just figures but the data of humans from around the globe that can give an enormous amount of information about their behavior, their affiliations, sentiments, and other vital aspects that if analyzed and processed well can change the graphs of businesses!

With companies spending a lot in hiring data engineers, analysts, data scientists, and other related job profiles, it can be understood as an investment made in the data resources. Post-corona virus hit, many businesses found that AI and data science were necessary to attract potential customers and maximize their efficiencies. Not only from the business aspect, the governments, parliaments, and the agencies have used the data analytics and modeling tools to track the COVID-19 outbreak in real-time. BlueDot, a start-up based in Toronto, was the first to report the COVID-19 outbreak in Wuhan in December 2019 because its AI, machine learning, and big data-based platform predicted some unusual pneumonia cases happening around the market in Wuhan. After that, Google’s DeepMind published a research paper based on deep learning, predicting the structure of proteins associated with SARS-CoV-2, the virus causing COVID-19 using their AlphaFold system.

This gives us a brief idea about the potential of the data but there are two phrases we need to remember — “Not all data is useful” and “All data is useful but is not used”. Seems like conflicting, right? The thing is that the data that is available consists of noise, outliers that if generalized can lead to the loss of meaning and can be a hit back. That is why before using the data for predictions, it is preprocessed and prepared enough to make it trustworthy. Another side of the coin is that the outlier data can speak volumes and is not totally a ‘waste data’ if utilized properly.

Photo by Morning Brew on Unsplash

The world may have been a little slow in realizing this matrix of a data revolution that has already enveloped us but the top-lined businesses had understood its importance way before. Be it Google, Facebook, Netflix, or the data science companies like Numerator, Cloudera, data science has been at the root of the career opportunities of the modern world. You must have heard about the openings for analytics managers, business analysts, data analysts, research analysts, data scientists, etc. As per the Glassdoor report, data scientists in America have an average salary of around 90K USD! With thousands of career opportunities, the proper guide to step into the field becomes crucial for those aspiring to stay in the top command.

Image source: Google

The world may have been a little slow in realizing this matrix of a data revolution that has already enveloped us but the top-lined businesses had understood its importance way before. Be it Google, Facebook, Netflix, or the data science companies like Numerator, Cloudera, data science has been at the root of the career opportunities of the modern world. You must have heard about the openings for analytics managers, business analysts, data analysts, research analysts, data scientists, etc. As per the Glassdoor report, data scientists in America have an average salary of around 90K USD! With thousands of career opportunities, the proper guide to step into the field becomes crucial for those aspiring to stay in the top command.

Stay tuned. Happy learning:)