Money 20/20 Europe: Data scientists are farmers and machine learning is statistics on steroids

Data scientists can provide firms with access to a magical world of machine learning and all that it promises. This question was posed to a panel of experts in the field at Money 20/20 Europe in Copenhagen. Jay van Zyle of Innosect, moderating, asked if a data scientist is now just a computer person that went on a statistics course, or conversely, a stats person that went on a computer programming course? Or is it entirely a new discipline? Marco Bressan, chief data scientist, BBVA provided an elegant analogy to illustrate the plight of the data scientist: "One simple way is to look at data scientists doing machine learning as farmers. While traditional software developers you could look at more like manufacturers. "Traditional software developers would put modules together, and that would come out one machine.