Data scientists at forefront of changes in technology businesses - Artificial Intelligence Online

For a field supposedly starved of talent, data science seems to have been minting a lot of new experts in a hurry. The depth of interest was on display this week in San Francisco, where 1,600 people turned up for a data science summit organised by Turi, a company run by University of Washington machine learning professor Carlos Guestrin. Mr Guestrin argues that all software applications will need inbuilt intelligence within five years, making data scientists -- people trained to analyse large bodies of information -- key workers in this emerging "cognitive" technology economy. Whether or not he is right about the coming ubiquity, there is already a core of critical applications that depend on machine learning, led by recommendation programmes, fraud detection systems, forecasting tools and applications for predicting customer behaviour. The adaptation of what was until recently the preserve of research scientists into production-grade business applications could point to a profound change in corporate competitiveness. The companies showing off their skills in data science and machine learning at the Turi event -- including Uber, Pinterest and Quora -- were all born in the digital era.