Taken from Harrison Tasoff's article in UCSB's online soure, The Current:
Eight years ago, venture capitalist Geoffrey Moore tweeted this prescient assertion: “Without big-data analytics, companies are blind and deaf.”
Increasingly, data runs our lives. It allows companies to compete, drives web advertising and supports policy making. It can lead to improved performance by farmers, airlines, athletes, highway systems and banks. It fuels artificial intelligence and the Internet of Things, and catalyzes scientific discovery on many levels.
But, on its own, data is just raw information. It takes people — data scientists, in particular — to give meaning to the numbers. With their unique skillsets, data scientists are able to extract knowledge and glean insights from the extensive datasets that society now generates every day. As a result, data science is, increasingly, where the jobs are.
To answer the growing demand for data scientists, the National Science Foundation (NSF) has awarded UC Santa Barbara a three-year, nearly $920,000 grant to fund what is known as the Central Coast Data Science Initiative. The program will support coursework and project-based classes at the community college and undergraduate levels at four partnering colleges and universities.
The initiative will include classes and student projects as well as a collaboration of data scientists. Most of the funds will go toward undergraduate fellowships for these new data scientists, explained Tim Robinson, an academic coordinator in the Department of Computer Science. UC Santa Barbara plans to provide 65 fellowships over a two-year period....
