The History of Data Science

The later part of that decade saw folks in silicon valley companies formalize the title. When I started the research labs at eBay over a decade ago it was hard to imagine any work without data. While I had a team of engineers and scientists who looked at all aspects of data from infrastructure to algorithms to machine learning to vision, HCI and economics, none of them had the title of a "data scientist" (it wasn't a "sexy" title then) I saw each one as an expert in their respective field but who worked (or had to learn to work) with large amounts of data. The overall team could have been thought of as a data science team - as in "the elephant and the blindfolded men" story, each one bringing in IQ along a certain dimension and all of them together completing the story. It opened up opportunities for collaboration, learning techniques from other fields, realizing that there are similar techniques from other fields.