Hot or Not: Data Science Trends in 2015

CrowdFlower infographic predicts the hot trends for data science in 2015 and which trends will fade away.



The countdown for 2015 has already begun. After making tremendous progress in 2014, Crowdflower-logoData Science is ready to witness new trends emerging and dominating in 2015. While some of these trends are widely acceptable, others are slightly debatable. Only time will tell the real winners. Until then, we all would have to decide for our self which 2015 trend to believe in.

CrowdFlower, a people-powered data enrichment platform, recently released an interesting infographic based on the response of their data scientists’ expectation for 2015. Here are a few insights from their report:

Chief Data Scientists will take the hot seat, while the Chief Information Officers (CIOs) are pushed to the back seat, for driving the executive decisions in 2015.
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The term “Big Data” would yield to “Rich Data” – This one is no surprise as we have already seen a lot of articles in 2014 criticizing the over-use of “Big Data” term, rendering it essentially meaningless. Like “Innovation” or “Disruption”, “Big Data” is being used today for pretty much anything and everything related to Data Science, and this definitely needs to stop.

Following the dominance of Open Source in Big Data technology, Open Data is expected to gain significance in 2015. People are increasingly realizing the value of unlocking data from the silo-ed data warehouses and making it freely, easily accessible.
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In 2014, we saw Data Scientist positions being established in various departments across organizations. In 2015, we expect these Data Scientists to start collaborating (within as well as across organizations) in order to capture greater value from data.

The progress of Big Data has so far been driven by corporate incentives for greater profit. But, now we are starting to see the value of Big Data for social good. We expect more initiatives and conferences on this in 2015, than we saw in 2014.
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Data Democratization – The ability for anyone, and not just data scientists or geeks, to be able to analyze and use data can be a disruptive force in 2015. Several software releases in 2014 have focused on massive consumerization of analytics, and we are yet to see what users will do with this power (combined with Open Data initiatives).
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Further details and the complete infographic can be found here: http://www.crowdflower.com/blog/data-science-2015-whats-hot-whats-not

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