The Role of Academia in Data Science Education

Citation: Irizarry, R. A. (2020). The Role of Academia in Data Science Education. Harvard Data Science Review, 2(1). https://doi.org/10.1162/99608f92.dd363929

This article has several useful facts and viewpoints. Some highlights:

“we adapt Wing’s definition and propose that ‘data science is an umbrella term to describe the entire complex and multistep processes used to extract value from data.’”

“Having the goal of training an individual to be an expert that can tackle all the challenges involved in the data science process is too ambitious. “

“it should be noted that, given the independence and project ownership required for many data science jobs, recruiters typically explicitly look for Ph.Ds.”

“Bring applications to the forefront. Adapt statistics and machine learning courses to have applications in the forefront rather than a theoretical focus (Hicks & Irizarry, 2018). Furthermore, underscore the necessity to understand the context or subject matter of the problems. Ensure that Computer Science courses on algorithms, optimization, or data structures focus on implementations.”

Google trends monthly data for searches for “data science” through November 2019.