Data Science

Data science has critical applications across most industries, and is one of the most in-demand careers in computer science. Data scientists are the detectives of the big data era, responsible for unearthing valuable data insights through analysis of massive datasets. And just like a detective is responsible for finding clues, interpreting them, and ultimately arguing their case in court, the field of data science encompasses the entire data life cycle.

That starts with capturing lots of raw data using data collection techniques, and then building and maintaining data pipelines and data warehouses that efficiently “clean” the data and make it accessible for analysis at scale. This data infrastructure allows data scientists to efficiently process datasets using data mining and data modeling skills, as well as analyze these outputs with sophisticated techniques like predictive analysis and qualitative analysis. Finally, these findings must be presented using data visualization and data reporting skills to help business decision makers.

Depending on the size of the company, data scientists may be responsible for this entire data life cycle, or they might specialize in a particular portion of the life cycle as part of a larger data science team.‎

In today’s era of “big data”, data science has critical applications across most industries. This gives students with data science backgrounds a wide range of career opportunities, from general to highly specific.

Some companies may hire data scientists to work on the entire data life cycle, while larger organizations may employ an entire team of data scientists with more specialized positions such as data engineers to build data infrastructure or data analysts, business intelligence analysts, decision scientists to interpret and use this data.

Some tech companies may employ much more specialized data scientists. For example, companies building internet of things (IoT) devices using speech recognition need natural language processing engineers. Public health organizations may need disease mappers to build predictive epidemiological models to forecast the spread of infectious diseases. And firms developing artificial intelligence (AI) applications will likely rely on machine learning engineers.‎

Yes! In fact, Coursera is one of the best places to learn about big data. You can take individual courses and Specializations spanning multiple courses on big data, data science, and related topics from top-ranked universities from all over the world, from the University California San Diego to Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. Coursera also offers the opportunity to learn from industry leaders in the field like Google, Cloudera, and IBM, including options to get professional certificates.‎