Data Science: challenges, directions and opportunities

Data Scientist, according to users of online employment analysts Glassdoor, came out with the overall best score in the 2016 report. To many, it might seem surprising to pick data scientist as the “best job”. The aim of this talk is to explain the reason of this phenomena and to convince the young students to consider it as one of the most interesting and most challenging disciplines in the era of Industry 4.0.

The concept of data science was originally proposed within the statistics and mathematics community, where it essentially concerned data analysis. Data science today goes beyond specific areas like data mining and machine learning or whether it is the next generation of statistics. Formally, data science is a new trans-disciplinary field that builds on and synthesizes many relevant disciplines and bodies of knowledge, including statistics, informatics, computing, communication, management, and sociology, to study data following "data science thinking".

We  plan to talk about the history and the main issues of data science and to present some typical applications of data science in our everyday life. We will have also a discussion about the two main challenges concerning the intrinsic complexities and intelligence in data science. We also consider the main research directions and application areas of data science in the nearest future. At the end, we will focus on the most important skills that potential data scientists must have to be competitive in this growing marketplace.