Will the API Kill the Data Scientist?

Since PipelineDB released the developer preview of its realtime analytics API, Stride, one is tempted to ask whether APIs in connection with machine learning may replace the growing role of human data scientists in the data analytics space. To further explore this concept, ProgrammableWeb caught up with PipelineDB's President and Co-Founder, Jeff Ferguson. Ferguson and his team believe that machine learning can easily replace the role humans play in a number of data analytics tasks, and this shift has already begun to take place. "Machines can learn all sorts of things from streaming and siloed datasets, all with orders of magnitude more accuracy, speed, and scale than human beings," Ferguson told ProgrammableWeb. "A simple example is realtime a/b testing in advertising, where self-healing software systems can create, test, and iterate on multiple versions of ad copy, continuously weighting campaign spend toward ads with the highest click-through rates."