ISSUE 12 | BIG DATA
BIG DATA INNOVATION
“ big data in education
inside:
is the education system filling the skills gap? being protected?
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: how is children’s data
big data and its use in higher education
LETTER FROM THE EDITOR Welcome to this issue of Big Data Innovation. The first thing you will have probably noticed when seeing the cover of this issue is that we have been busy redesigning the layout of the magazine from back to front. We have made it more visually exciting as well as more compact, meaning that even more information is packed into a smaller space. We have also been working on a new website for the magazine, which will work off our overall channels sites. If you want to see the new channels sites have a look at channels. theinnovationenterprise.com. The full site for the magazine will be ready in the next few weeks, but the channels do currently offer some of the best content on Big Data that we produce. This issue is dedicated to Big Data in education, something that is especially pertinent given that many will be starting new school years this month. We discuss data use throughout the education system, from the youngest to university graduates, as well
as the ways in which it is being taught and how it could be used to fill the current skills shortage. In addition to this Dean Meyers talks to us about the importance of storytelling in data visualization. We also look at a new app that is helping the electorate to keep track of what their elected representatives are doing. Simon Barton also takes us through the pros and cons of a ‘safe route’ app, that uses data to plot a safe walk home.
Managing Editor: George Hill Assistant Editors Simon Barton Art Director: Joe Sanderson Cover Design: Chelsea Carpenter Advertising: Hannah Sturgess
As always, if you like the magazine, share it.
hsturgess@theiegroup.com
Also, if you are interested in contributing to the magazine or website, please contact me at ghill@theiegroup.com
Contributors: Heather James Chris Towers Dean Meyers
George Hill Managing Editor Are you are looking to put your products in front of key decision makers? For Advertising contact Hannah at hsturgess@theiegroup.com
Max Bowen General Enquiries: ghill@theiegroup.com
2014
CONTENTS
5 WALKING HOME We see how Big Data is helping people to stay safe and save time on their walk home.
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DATA VIZ AND STORYTELLING
PREDICTING THE POLITICIANS
BIG DATA IN JUNIOR SCHOOLS
Dean Meyers talks us through why Big Data has never had it so good, with the amount and variation of data viz available today.
Big Data is now allowing the public to view the actions of politicians to see where their taxes, and more importantly their vote, is going.
After a series of data leaks from the school system we see whether data should be held on the youngest and most vulnerable in society.
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BIG DATA IN HIGHER EDUCATION
IS EDUCATION CLOSING THE GAP?
Heather James looks at how data is being used in higher education and in university courses across the globe.
We investigate whether enough is being done by education institutes to help fill the current shortage of skills in Big Data and Analytics.
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BIG DATA: HELPING YOU WALK HOME AT NIGHT Chris Towers, Big Data Evangelist
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We’ve all been there, it’s dark and a little late to be roaming around somewhere that’s unfamiliar – the chances of walking into someone unpleasant is higher than usual. Thankfully, Big Data is stepping in to help us find the safest way home, with mobile applications at the forefront of the trend. You may have thought you’d found the ideal app in ‘SketchFactor’, a crowdsourced service that lets its customers ‘get lost intelligently’ - yet if you care to delve into it for 5 minutes, it’s clear that it’s no more than a platform for ‘internet trolls’, whose idea of ‘sketchiness’ is far from what anyone would ever consider dangerous. The Guardian reported that the application ‘comes across as prejudiced and scaremongering, not to say snobby as hell’. In the same article it says that critics have accused it of being ‘the technological equivalent of people crossing the road to avoid youths, or turning their noses up at a less salubrious zip code’. Fair enough, ‘Sketchfactor’ may have been short-sighted even suffers from accusations of being, but there is an ember of a good idea buried somewhere
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BIG DATA: HELPING YOU WALK HOME AT NIGHT
beneath all its flaws. With the population density within urban areas continually increasing, the general consensus is that more people equals more crime. Every city has its bad areas, whether its New York, London or Paris, there are areas that some people just wouldn’t go to. With this in mind, a mobile service that actually used sophisticated algorithms to help you get your bearings in times of need would be really useful.
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‘Sketchfactor’ does use crime data, but it seems that it’s more reliant on crowdsourced comments that often have nothing to do with actual danger. Instead, comments like ‘hipsters making too much noise’ seem to be made more out of jest than anything sinister. But researchers at Boston University and The University of Pittsburg have embarked on a new project, one that uses real data to get you home safely.
Their proposal, ‘Safepath’, will estimate the risk of a crime depending on simple data points like; the time at which a crime happened, the type of crime that occurred and of course the amount of recorded events that have arisen in a given place. Thankfully, there are no contributions from
the public, observations are attained purely from hard data, which means they are free from prejudice and inaccurate observations. This seems to demote crowdsourcing as a sham, a platform that just lets people transmit whatever spurious information they have – this is clearly not the case, but in this instance, data is better placed to help people.
the technological equivalent of people crossing the road to avoid youths, or turning their noses up at a less salubrious zip code Although some are crying out for help when they’re lost, they equally don’t want to walk 5 miles more than they need to. It’s important that anyone looking to design a similar program understands that there has to be a compromise between distance and safety. The algorithms used at ‘Safe Path’ calculate both the safest and the fastest route – if both are the same, then that’s ideal, it’s up to you to choose, but the system will also throw up any routes that are less safe but shorter than the safest route or longer but safer than the shortest.
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BIG DATA: HELPING YOU WALK HOME AT NIGHT
The problem is, the researchers don’t have any current plans to turn it over to the public. But what it does mean is that it’s something that ‘maps’ providers like Google could incorporate into their systems in order to improve the wellbeing of people living in urbanised areas in the future. The hope is that through data it will be possible to map the complexities of a city, meaning that ill-prepared providers like ‘SketchFactor’ won’t have the opportunity to give people a platform to make a mockery of an idea that in principal has huge civic benefit. I do fear that the criticism ‘SketchFactor’ attracted will have put some off from developing similar systems, and
that the collateral damage may well be that new developers will wait a couple of years before attempting to reintroduce the idea to the public. If it’s done in the correct way however, there’s no reason why data can’t be used to guide you back home safely.
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Although people are crying out for help when they’re lost, they equally don’t want to walk 5 miles more than they need to
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DATAVIZ AND STORYTELLING: DATA NEVER HAD IT SO GOOD Dean Meyers Publisher/Visual Problem-Solver, Vizworld.com
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DATA VIZ
Take your pic: Tableau will run on your PC or Mac, and in the latest version you can set up a series of views with captions that tell a particular story. CartoDB features Odyssey.js to tell map or location-based stories. Earlier this year, I reported that Visual. ly, a marketplace for infographics and data visualization services, is now offering more complete services for customers, creating marketing programs that takes elements from projects to build them into stories, told over longer time periods. For the mobile audience, Roambi’s Flow embeds interactive data reporting into mobile-based documents. #DataViz is having its day, certainly. But Data visualization needs more than data scientists, data visualization programmers, and statisticians. Data visualization needs storytellers, and here’s why. Big Data is no longer news. Use it or don’t use it, it’s here. And there’s more than raw, non-human readable data points available as well. We are in a wash of images, both still and moving. Over 6 billion hours of video are watched each month on YouTube—
that’s almost an hour for every person on Earth. We create this stuff with our smartphones, DSLRS, wearables, and surveillance cameras, 24 hours-a-day.
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We look at pictures stretched to show us massive wide angles (thanks to the GoPro camera). We watch it in endless loops of 6 to 15 seconds (Vine and Instagram), and recently Instagram added Hyperlapse time compression so that we can see a visual story happen faster than real time, just to get to ‘the good stuff’ quicker. Even though we have more videos and pictures available than we could ingest in a lifetime, we can’t get enough of it. We want to know the story in the picture and the story behind the video. We just can’t get enough stories told to us, through pictures, words, or data visualizations. We know that cave dwellers painted pictures that told stories visually. And we have seen a huge trend in using infographics to create viral activity on the web. Animated ‘explainer videos’ also have massive appeal, and are becoming a staple for telling deeper, more sophisticated stories (and sales pitches), because of our natural fascination with them, (which I can explain elsewhere). So
where does this all fit into data visualization?
We want to know the story in the picture and the story behind the video. Considering that our brains are wired to both identify patterns and tell stories, with all the technology available and all of the data that is bombarding us, we continuously aim to ‘see better’. You can begin with charting in Excel, and work your way up through Tableau and other interactive tools. The technology can, indeed, give us a wider view, or a faster view. We can sort more quickly, hold bigger datasets, hunt for outliers better, faster and more deeply than before. Yet, we need to give all of that meaning, purpose, and assign it to a use. This can only be done through storytelling. You may pick your type of story. It could be exploration and discovery of the unknown that will enrich us. It could be the classic hero’s journey, used to explain transformation, to a new and better self. Let it be about the rise or fall of an empire (or business), or the story of the horrors of gun use that ends victim’s lives before
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their natural time span. Invest the time, depth of analysis, and awareness of context to tell a compelling story. The complexity of the image is less important than a clear definition of the data visualization’s purpose. There is a secret sauce to good data visualization storytelling: useful and effective data visualization must engage the viewer/user emotionally. Employ storytelling in every data visualization you create. Find emotional touchpoints that with drive people to interact with the data. Use journalists, historians, or people who have the ability to synthesize all of those data points and images into something that makes meaning and sense out of it all. Engage creative writers, artists, filmmakers, graphic recorders, and designers, and team them up with your most gifted programmers, statisticians, and data scientists to create memorable, powerful, useful stories. Tell stories that happen to be in the form of data visualizations. Then watch how people can think differently, and perhaps, change.
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DATA VIZ
About Dean Meyers, publisher of VizWorld.com: Dean is a visual problem-solver and visual thinker, blending experience and expertise across multiple disciplines (technology, marketing, design, art, performance and management) to visually synthesize both content and context as it is happens. He is happiest when working visually in the fields of innovation, user experience, education, and transmedia—even more when they are all combined into one! VizWorld.com offers news and community for visual thinkers across multiple disciplines. Whether you are a data visualization scientist, media artist and creator, design thinker or visual marketer, read and participate in VizWorld.com to expand your world of visual thinking!
PREDICTING THE MOVEMENT OF POLITICIANS THROUGH BIG DATA Max Bowen, Big Data Evangelist
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Up until now, Big Data has put even more power in the hands of the government and big business. But it seems as if the tables are turning - it may now be possible for us to keep a watchful eye on them. This is a notable change from what we experienced in 2012 when the Obama administration used Big Data to view the electorate ‘as a collection of people who make a more perfect union’. It was a move that caught the old guard out, they called it a disruptive force - the reality was, it gave Obama the edge over McCain in a campaign that went right down to the wire.
POLITICIANS
With the congressional elections coming up this year, hopefuls will be doing their best to pull together a team of accomplished analysts whose insights will hopefully determine how those sitting on the fence are likely to sway come voting day. But this year marks a change – the frustration we feel when a politician fails to live up to a promise made prior to election is commonplace, but it seems as if companies are stepping up to the plate to make sure that politicians keep to their word. An example of this is FiscalNote, a web based service that uses algorithms based on legislative votes and electoral
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statistics in order to determine the outcome of bills in congress and state legislatures. Other services like the Georgia Legislative Navigator, operate under a narrower scope, but equally give voters the opportunity to research politicians before they vote for them in parliament. The hope is that such developments will allow users to access a wide variety of bills that are introduced by congress each year – by keeping tabs on the developments of these bills as well as being able to identify the individuals most likely to get them enacted, businessmen, protesters and political groups can target
It was a move that caught the old guard out, they called it a disruptive force reality was, it gave Obama the edge over McCain in a campaign that went down to the wire.
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POLITICIANS
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This can negate any possibility that an endeavour will ultimately be wasted because of unreleased plans by the government.
specific legislator’s when they feel they have something to add to a bill. In late 2013, Fiscal Note were given a vote of confidence when Alec Ross joined their board of advisors. As a former advisor to Hillary Clinton, his inclusion shows that they’re being taken seriously as a way forward for people hoping to better understand their governments. For companies, such programs such as Fiscal Note, can help them make
more educated decisions about strategy before a bill is actually implemented. This can negate any possibility that planning will ultimately be wasted because of unreleased plans by the government. Whether companies like Fiscal Note can actually swing the pendulum back in the favour of the public remains unlikely. For the time being we will have to make do with the fact that Big Data still wields more power in the hands of big
businesses and politicians. But company’s like Fiscal Note can perhaps mark the beginning of this journey towards change, a society where the power of data is shared equally. It’s unlikely however that this power shift will have changed much come this year’s congressional elections.
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BIG DATA AND ITS USE IN JUNIOR SCHOOLS Simon Barton | Assistant Editor
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BIG DATA AND ITS USE IN PRIMARY SCHOOLS
The fear that Big Data will jeopardise our privacy is nothing new, neither is our acceptance that much of what we do will be recorded and stored electronically. What might come as more of a shock is that school children aren’t immune from data collection either. Attendance and test scores only touch the surface, from gender to race, health status to disciplinary records – in the words of Dan Tynan at Yahoo, ‘they’re like data-generating machines’. Data gathering on school children isn’t new – most our of school records will be buried somewhere deep in a filing cabinet gathering dust, but the difference is that whereas our records were in paper form and only accessible to school educators, today’s students have their information stored electronically and therefore cannot guarantee such security. In the English county of Devon, a situation arose recently where a primary school inadvertently sent an email to parents, which leaked private data about 200 children – the information included; their date of birth, their educational needs and behavioural issues. Despite the sensitivity of the data, it was still shared across
social media, whilst other parents used the information to contact other parents. In the UK, an organisation can be fined up to £500,000 for a data leak such as this, but it remains to be seen what punishment will be in store for the Curledge Street Academy. In New York, it was revealed that data housed at the Sachem School District was leaked to a website. In the words of one of the witnesses to the data;
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‘I saw medical records (immunization, allergy, etc) and a letter from a doctor stating the child was prescribed Ritalin and his dosage. I saw a list of student ID’s with their names and whether they were receiving free lunch or not. I saw report cards.’ The blogger also goes on to say that he had seen students’ legal records, including a case where a student had been reprimanded for smoking marijuana on a school bus. You can understand why the police would keep such an event electronically filed away, but surely such an incident could be stored in paper form by a school when there was a chance it could be leaked on a website. Some will point to the fact that such data can be used for research purposes, possibly
as an avenue to determine which students’ turn to drugs and more importantly why they do it, but it seems that storing such information would be better served from an ethical standpoint, in paper form.
I saw medical records (immunization, allergy, etc) and a letter from a doctor stating the child was prescribed Ritalin and his dosage. The worries regarding the private records of school children isn’t something new, in fact, security breaches started to occur as far back as 2012. Gabbitas, one of the leading organisation’s in education consultancy, committed a blunder when they shared 1,367 private records on the UK Independent Schools Guide website. In a similar vein to that of the recent case in Devon, the leak wasn’t caused by malice, but by negligence. This ineptitude demonstrates that some people whose job it is to keep this data under wraps aren’t always treating it with the respect it requires. Until The Sunday Telegrapgh notified the ICO that there had been a leak, information that included; names, addresses
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and behavioural issues, was easily accessible through a simple Google search. Despite the information on the website being cleared up quickly, it’s impossible to tell who has this information and what they’ll do with it in the future.
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Clearly then, there’s a lot that can go wrong. For America’s youth, the push towards mass data collection at the school level is particularly worrying. For one, the school districts that are collecting the information lack the expertise to manage these databases and therefore outsource the job to third party contractors. The increasing trend towards this,meant that in 2011 there had to be an amendment to the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) so that these agencies could access this data.
This can lead to private companies getting hold of the data and targeting both the children and the parents for commercial purposes or worse.
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BIG DATA AND ITS USE IN PRIMARY SCHOOLS
The problem with these third-party contractors is that there are few means to monitor their work and with penalties seeming relatively lenient, there seems to be a lot of scope for misuse. This can lead to private companies getting hold of the data and targeting both the children and the parents for commercial purposes or worse. There have even been rumours that when these children go for job interviews in the future, companies will lobby for the data so that they can investigate their past, effectively having an impact for the rest of their life. As mentioned at the start of this article, most of us have come to accept that our data is aggregated and stored without our knowledge or permission. Government agencies may say that collecting data on students from such a young age will give them vital insights, such as, the ability to predict future murderers and terrorists, but surely damaging an individual’s job prospects because they did something out of naivety when they were a child, is a short-sighted approach and one that could inhibit a bright individual from reaching their potential.
Whatever the case, there has to be stricter regulations in place to safeguard the privacy of school children and to punish those who leak data, both inadvertently and deliberately. Even if we accept that our data is going to be collected, surely there is an age where it becomes unacceptable.
BIG DATA IN HIGHER EDUCATION Heather James | Director, Big Data Innovation Summit
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In the previous article, we argued that the use of Big Data in primary schools can be risky. That is a stance that few would sway from, but the trend towards the use of Big Data in higher education is something that can be truly beneficial to students. Again, there are privacy concerns, but at least its use in higher education can bring tangible benefits for the students whose data is being stored. Measuring student engagement is a real challenge, especially for large establishments where there are upward of 20,000 students in attendance – as mere drops in the ocean, there is a real possibility that they can become isolated and categorised into broad demographics. With online systems becoming the norm in many universities and colleges, opportunities have arisen that allow educators to see how their students are interacting with online content. This includes monitoring the amount of time they spend on each topic and how many pages they have looked at. For example, The University of Tasmania have introduced a Learning Management System (LMS) that tracks student engagement. The data they attain can provide educators
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with information that could be vital to an individual’s academic progression – one problem is that the data can be interpreted differently. If a student spends 2 seconds on a page, does that mean they understand the topic already or that they’re so confused by what they’ve seen that they can’t bear to look at it – it’s far from clear cut.
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But the Chief Innovation Officer at The University of Tasmania seems sold, he says ‘The LMS allows us to monitor how often a student logs on to the system, which pages were visited, how much time was spent on each page and the individual’s progress over time’. The new ‘flipped classroom’ that higher education students are expected to adhere to, often sees students answering questions whilst they’re undertaking an online module. If this process is implemented, it can provide educators with insights that go beyond ambiguous data sets like how long they’ve spent on a page, and instead provide them with whether a question was answered incorrectly and whether the module was completed on time – with this already known prior to the start of a class, lectures can be moulded around what the group needs, instead of it just
sticking to the curriculum. When discussing Big Data and Education, it’s impossible to not talk about ‘Massive Online Open Courses’ (MOOC’s), a concept that emerged in 2012. Although many suggest that MOOC’s are close to disrupting the higher education market, it would seem for the time being that the biggest adopters will be large enterprises, offering training to their employees.
If a student spends 2 seconds on a page, does that mean they understand the topic already or that they’re so confused by what they’ve seen that they can’t bear to look at it If MOOC’s are to pick up pace, Big Data will be absolutely essential. When dealing with hundreds of thousands of students, leveraging insights from data is important, and arguably the only recourse educators will have to figure out how their students are progressing. At the same university in Tasmania, they also want to create a profile of their students based upon less obvious data points including where they study, the amount
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of time they spend in the library, what devices they study on and what type of books they are loaning out. By aggregating this data they hope to be able to create a holistic profile of each and every student, which will allow them to push relevant content to the students so that they are not bombarded with information that is of little interest to them.
Although some will see the foray into social media as a step too far, there is something to be said for using its insights Although some will see the foray into social media as a step too far, there is something to be said for using its insights, especially when grouping similar students. Coupled with data on test scores and perceived learning styles, study groups can be formed that get the best out of each student involved. For example, putting together a cluster of students that are struggling in one area can allow teachers and lecturers to deliver class-specific recommendations without holding back students that are more advanced in that area. Often, teachers can become aware of this gap forming in
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their classes without data, but without data to back up their assertions, officials are often wary to separate classes. With hard numbers now at their disposal, they can prove to officials that their observations were correct. Some will argue that grouping struggling students is not useful. But it’s aim is allow students to work at their own pace whilst also profiting from supplementary materials. Compared to the primary school sector, higher education is far more suitable for Big Data. It can be argued that the data being collected is still delicate, but when the objective is to determine whether a student is doing well in a course rather than typecasting a child based upon their behaviour in pre-school, it certainly seems more viable. The techniques we are currently seeing are far from perfect, but at the same time, it seems as if things are heading in the right direction. Young adults create so much data that many of them will look forward to it being used in a way that truly benefits them.
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THE BIG DATA SKILLS GAP, IS DATA EDUCATION DOING ENOUGH? George Hill, Editor
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The Big Data skills gap is something that we have covered a number of times at Big Data Innovation. It is an important element to discuss when looking at the proliferation of data, as without the necessary man power to supplement technology, it is the equivalent of having a Formula 1 car with a lawnmower engine. Education has been the prerequisite to filling this gap as the only way to fill the vaccancies that currently exist is through having qualified data scientists who have been trained at good schools and are ready to hit the ground running. Simply having a degree in statistics or maths is no longer going to be good enough in the current climate. In order to make the most of data, people will need to have a complex understanding of algorithms as well as programming and business knowledge. So how are education systems trying to offer effective data education to cope with this shortfall? One of the key players in this are IBM, who have partnered with more than 1000 universities to help promote data led education programmes. As one of the
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BIG DATA SKILLS GAP
leading companies involved in analytics and Big Data, this involvement has a mutual benefit to them, the more data scientists who graduate, the more the industry will improve.
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One of the first institutions to fully immerse itself in data education is New York University’s Center for Urban Science and Progress (CUSP), who have now enrolled their second class. The background of the students vary from those who have PHDs in mathematics, to those who have arts based degrees and are self taught in coding.
With only 25 students in the class for CUSP it is a drop in the ocean for a skills shortage that was predicted to be over 100,000 as far back as 2011. We have seen the numbers of job opportunities with the word ‘Big Data’ in the title increase on some recruitment sites, by around 800% in the last two years, so although CUSP is a good start, more still needs to be done to support the data community and to create a well rounded and fully educated workforce. One of the most important aspects of this will be the introduction of courses designed to be the catalyst
for future data scientists. This could be from basic coding classes in high school to more complex statistics and business based courses for those who show a definitive interest in the subject.
One of the key players in this is IBM who have partnered with more than 1000 universities to help promote data led education programmes. Familiarising students early with the basics of what is required to become a data scientist is going to be increasingly important. It is even the case that some working within the space believe that more could be done in junior school and even kindergarten. Creating basic data problems for children and making them create groups and sort objects into more useable formations is the start of a data driven mindset. It may sound suspect, but the reality is that this is how many will start on their journey to eventually becoming data scientists. The skills gap is not something that is going to disappear within one or two years, but is instead a long term project.
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BIG DATA SKILLS GAP
There is an increasing number of higher education institutions that are offering Big Data and data science degrees or masters programmes but despite this, it will still be a long time before the gap is filled. In the US for instance, there are roughly 2,000,000 graduates every year, meaning that in order to fill the vacant positions in one year there would need to be at least 8% of the total student population studying data science. The reality is that this will never happen. Therefore it will take time to build to that number by gradually introducing more and
more data courses. The aim of starting data education at a young age is that it not only prepares students to use data in the future, but also means that they are more likely to study it at higher education levels. Another issue is the time it takes to educate students. The pace of change within data is rapid, software and hardware has a limited shelf life, so if a student starts learning how to use these technologies in year one, then by the time they finish three years later, the chances are that the systems
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they learnt on will be obsolete. It is perhaps then important to discuss new issues within Big Data and to teach the fundamentals that can be applied to data in general rather than the specifics of technologies, but this is theory also has it’s floors because when starting to work, it will take time to adjust to new and often complex technologies. Overall, steps are being taken in the right direction in order to fill the skills gap, it will take sustained efforts to fill, but it seems that companies like IBM are helping students to move in the right direction.
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