Summary
- A history of a Statistician / Nurse.
- A story of a today’s Data Scientist life at work.
- A guess of what tomorrow’s Data Scientist will do.
First, a tale from history:
In November 1854, Florence Nightingale arrived in Scutari to serve as a nurse during Crimean War. She had a gift for mathematics from an early age, too. At the war hospital, she was faced with suffering, pain, and chaos.
“Wounded soldiers often arrived with diseases like typhus, cholera and dysentery. More men died from these diseases than from their injuries.” (1)
During the day she served as a nurse and during the night she had another mission — she was known as ‘Lady with the Lamp’. She was collecting data and analyzing the causes of soldiers’ mortality. When she got back to London, she visualized the data and got into raising awareness activities. She had shown, based on data, that soldiers’ injuries were not the main cause of deaths. She went on to establish the Army Medical College in Chatham in 1859 and continued to contribute for her cause. Her personal pain and suffering is only to be imagined, yet she prevailed to serve humanity through making use of data.
Second, a story of today:
The story of today’s Data Scientist resembles a bit the Nightingale’s work — especially about lacking data while desperately needing to understand the situation of soldiers. Today, not all Data Scientists save lives, but many actually do!
Many of today’s Data Scientists most probably would welcome more data, data streams, data sources, data infrastructure, and data engineering support. Yet, they are asked to produce better insights, models, inferences, visualizations, and provide consulting on decisions.
Very often Data Scientists are frustrated not because of a model not working in production but rather because of data sources not being available — especially now in the age of GDPR, this will get worse.
#data-lake #data-driven #machine-learning #gdpr #data-science #data analysis
