Role of Data Scientist & Big Data Sources

Role of Data Scientist

“Start-ups are producing so much data that hiring has increased dramatically. Salaries are on the rise for data scientists who are able to work closely with developers to provide value to end users,".

• The role of a data scientist is becoming more pivotal to even traditional organizations who didn’t previously invest much of their budgets in technology positions. 
• Big data is changing the way old-school organizations conduct business and manage marketing, and the data scientist is at the center of that transformation.
• Data scientists are often experts in technologies such as Hadoop, Pig, Python, and Java. Their jobs can focus on data management, analytics modeling, and business analysis. Because they tend to specialize in a narrow niche of data science, data scientists often work in teams within a company.
• Data scientists can be real change-makers within an organization, offering insight that can illuminate the company’s trajectory toward its ultimate business goals. 
• Data scientists are integral to supporting both leaders and developers in creating better products and paradigms. And as their role in big business becomes more and more important, they are in increasingly short supply.

Big Data Sources

The bulk of big data generated comes from three primary sources: social data, machine data and transactional data.

Social data comes from the Likes, Tweets & Retweets, Comments, Video Uploads, and general media that are uploaded and shared via the world’s favorite social media platforms. This kind of data provides invaluable insights into consumer behavior and sentiment and can be enormously influential in marketing analytics. The public web is another good source of social data, and tools like Google Trends can be used to good effect to increase the volume of big data.

Machine data is defined as information which is generated by industrial equipment, sensors that are installed in machinery, and even web logs which track user behavior. This type of data is expected to grow exponentially as the internet of things grows ever more pervasive and expands around the world. Sensors such as medical devices, smart meters, road cameras, satellites, games and the rapidly growing Internet Of Things will deliver high velocity, value, volume and variety of data in the very near future.

Transactional data is generated from all the daily transactions that take place both online and offline. Invoices, payment orders, storage records, delivery receipts – all are characterized as transactional data yet data alone is almost meaningless, and most organizations struggle to make sense of the data that they are generating and how it can be put to good use.