Who Does the Machine Learning and Data Science Work?

A survey of over 19,000 data professionals showed that nearly 2/3rds of respondents said they analyze data to influence product/business decisions. Only 1/4 of respondents said they do research to advance the state of the art of machine learning. Different data roles have different work activity profiles with Data Scientists engaging in more different work activities than other data professionals. We know that data professionals, when working on data science and machine learning projects, spend their time on a variety of different activities (e.g., gathering data, analyzing data, communicating to stakeholders) to complete those projects. Today's post will focus on the broad work activities (or projects) that make up their roles at work, including "Build prototypes to explore applying machine learning to new areas" and "Analyze and understand data to influence product or business decisions".