Need to start Full-time Undergraduate Program in Data Science

The use of social media and the internet has become an integral part of the life of most people. Social networking is the use of Internet-based social media sites to stay connected with friends, family, colleagues, customers, or clients. Social networking can have a social purpose, a business purpose, or both. At the beginning of the year 2020, the total worldwide people population is 7.8 billion and the internet has 4.54 billion users. Following are the amazing facts about social media site’s statistics

·         There are 3.725 billion active social media users
·         550 new social media users each minute
·         The average daily time spent on social is 142 minutes a day
·         474,000 Tweets per minute  
·         294 billion emails are sent per day
·         65 billion messages are sent on WhatsApp per day
·         Over 3.5 Billion Google searches are conducted worldwide each minute
·         YouTube users are watching 4,333,560 videos every minute.
·         300 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute
·         4.3 billion Facebook messages posted daily!

• Every minute on Facebook: 510,000 comments are posted, 293,000 statuses are updated, and 136,000 photos are uploaded.

·         There are over 38,000 status updates on Facebook every minute

These events are stored somewhere in the form of data. Now that’s a lot of data!! With each click, like and share, the world’s data pool is expanding faster than we comprehend. Data is being created every minute of every day in large volume, it has tremendous speed (velocity) and variety. These three v’s (volume, velocity, variety) makes this data, big data. The bulk of big data generated comes from three primary sources: social data, machine data and transactional data. Data is created by the internet, mobile phones, IoT devices, computers, electronic transactions, electronic gadgets, etc. The following statistics give you the idea of how much data is generated

• •         4 petabytes of data are created on Facebook
• •         4 terabytes of data are created from each connected car
• •         There are over 5 billion mobile device users generating 8 Exabytes of data
• •         Between 2016 and 2022, IoT devices are expected to increase at a rate of 21 percent. IoT devices, include connected cars, machines, meters, wearables and other consumer electronics they will generate lots of data. .
• •         There were 75 million Uber passengers, who are served by a total of 3.9 million drivers. 14 million Uber trips are completed each day
• •         Amazon sells more than 12 million products
• •         9 out of 10 consumers do a price check of a product on Amazon

By 2025, it’s estimated that 463 Exabytes (1000⁶ bytes) of data will be created each day globally – that’s the equivalent of 212,765,957 DVDs per day. We have massive amounts of data about many aspects of our lives, and, simultaneously, an abundance of inexpensive computing power. Shopping, communicating, reading news, listening to music, searching for information, expressing our opinions—all this is being tracked online.

The important question is - this data only keeps records of events happened or one can use it for some other purpose? Let us try to find out the answer for the following questions

·         Have you ever wondered how Amazon, eBay, Flipkart suggests items for you to buy?

• ·         How Gmail filter your emails in the spam and non-spam categories?
• ·         How Netflix predicts the shows of your liking?
• ·         How Google keeps on informing about the traffic on the route from your home to the office every day at office time?
• ·         How YouTube list videos on the related topic you have recently watched or shown interest?

How do they do it? These are the few questions we ponder from time to time. In reality, doing such tasks are impossible without the availability of data. It is said that “Data makes people think, emotions make them act”. The moment you start thinking about data you are trying to find some insight into the data. This insight of data will create an emotional story to take futuristic actions.  Businesses today are paying attention to scores of data sources to make crucial decisions about the future.

It’s not only the massiveness that makes all this new data interesting (or poses challenges). It’s that the data itself, often in real-time, becomes the building blocks of data products. On the Internet, this means Amazon’s recommendation systems, friend recommendations on Facebook, film and music recommendations, and so on. In finance, this means credit ratings, trading algorithms, and models. In education, this is starting to mean dynamic personalized learning and assessments coming out of places like Biju, Udacity, and Khan Academy. In government, this means policies based on data.

Now we have more information about the world around us than we ever had access to, and it's spread across a wider sample set than ever. Analyzing large data sets can lead to surprising revelations. Sometimes patterns and correlations are found in places not previously expected or that had only been theorized before. Observing and analyzing the environment is important for humans to learn, grow, and become a better-informed species. Here Data science plays an important role to capture meaningful insights of data.

As per Wikipedia, data science is an interdisciplinary field that uses scientific methods, processes, algorithms, and systems to extract knowledge and insights from many structural and unstructured data. Data science is all about using data to solve problems. The problem could be decision making, such as identifying which email is spam and which is not. Or a product recommendation such as which movie to watch? Or predicting the outcome, such as who will win the next general election? Data Science is a combination of various disciplines that are focusing on analyzing data and finding the best solutions based on them. Initially, those tasks were held by math or statistics specialists, but then data-experts began to use machine learning and artificial intelligence, which added optimization and computer science as a method for analyzing data. This new approach turned out to be much faster and effective, and so extremely popular.

Data science is bringing together all aspects of technology required for gathering, storing, analyzing and understanding data. This includes storage technology, distributed computing, data-driven modeling, data analytics and mining, visualization and security, among others. The proper interpretation and modeling require good domain understanding this becomes an inherently interdisciplinary endeavor. The core job of a data scientist is to understand the data, extract useful information out of it and apply this in solving the problems.

Data is very quickly becoming a vital tool for businesses and companies of all sizes. The availability and interpretation of data have altered the business models of old industries and enabled the creation of new ones. Data-driven businesses are worth $1.2 trillion collectively in 2020. Data scientists are responsible for breaking down data into usable information and creating software and algorithms that help companies and organizations determine optimal operations.

Following are some of the applications of Data science

• ·         Internet Search: Google searches use Data science technology to search a specific result within a fraction of a second. (63,000 searches per second)
• ·         Recommendation Systems: To create a recommendation system. For example, "suggested friends" on Facebook or suggested videos" on YouTube, everything is done with the help of Data Science.
• ·         Image & Speech Recognition: Speech recognizes systems like Siri, Google Assistant, Alexa runs on the technique of Data science. Moreover, Facebook recognizes your friend when you upload a photo with them, with the help of Data Science.
• ·         Online Price Comparison: Trivago, MakeMyTrip, Goibibo, PriceRunner, Junglee, Shopzilla work on the Data science mechanism. Here, data is fetched from the relevant websites using APIs.
• ·         Service industries like Amazon, eBay, Flipkart, Uber, Ola, OYO, BigBasket, Zomato, Swiggy are using lots of public & social media data & data science to offer better services to customers and to boost their sales.

Technology has driven innovation and we are more dependent on it than ever before. India has welcomed technology with open arms and with initiatives like ‘Digital India’, it will only encourage the integration of technology in all spheres of life. India had over 564.5 million Internet users in 2020 and the number is consistently increasing. With so much data being generated, organizations are slowly recognizing the importance of drawing insights from the data and using it to their advantage. Data science is one of the most important disciplines of the future, and it will intersect with every area as the reservoir of the world’s data continues to grow.

According to a study of the data science job market, 40% of global companies struggle to hire and retain data scientists. 1/3 of the top 400 Indian companies lack state-of-the-art data analysis tools and personnel. Further, the study estimate that 364,000 new jobs will be created in data by 2020 in India. According to a report from Nasscom, by 2021, the total Data science & AI job openings in India is estimated to go by 2,30,000. But the fresh employable talent or university talent available will be just 90,000, leaving a huge gap of 1,40,000.

Because of the growing importance of data, the demand for data analysts is at an all-time high. Emerging technologies like Cyber security, Cloud Computing, Artificial Intelligence (AI), etc are also experiencing a dearth of qualified professionals. These are fast-growing industries and there will be an increase in the number of job openings. The best way to stand out from your peers is to pursue a career in data science.

Now It’s high time universities and Institutes must think about starting a full-time Data Science program at Undergraduate (UG) level. Most of the universities are offering a UG program in Computer Sc with a specialization in Data Science. PG programs are also offered by many universities in Data Science.