The lost art of data science for understanding

There is a tremendous difference between data science for understanding and data science for prediction. The former is understanding why people use the emoji and what emotional states they are trying to communicate-- and how this differs across cultures and age groups. The latter is predicting that if someone types certain words in a certain order then the next emoji they'll type is . The former requires a rich and interdisciplinary set of skills -- mostly human skills -- as I first argued in a talk at Penn State in 2016. The latter is a purely technical problem -- and may even be a trivial technical problem -- and is just one part of the end-to-end data science process.