In his inaugural message to the audience at the Data Science Congress summit 2017, the largest data science event ever witnessed in India, Mr Y. S. Chowdary, Minister of State for Science and Technology & Earth Sciences, gave a clear indication of the direction in which future India is headed.
An entrepreneur at heart and a visionary politician, he is guiding the nation towards the next wave of technology. Data science is the science of leveraging data to get key insights, that would have otherwise gone unnoticed. As we are witnessing the deluge of data around us, its time we build the expertise to leverage this data to improve our competitive edge.
As he rightly pointed out, in this age of internet, too much information is actually a burden. We need to efficiently scrape the information to extract knowledge and leverage it to our benefit. We need to quickly grab the opportunity, and start adopting data science technologies to gain insights from information.
There are tremendous business opportunities that remain untapped, simply due to the lack of our ability to leverage data science. The minister confirmed that Government of India is offering financial support for various research projects in data science technologies. He sees an opportunity to create many high end jobs. The data science practitioners are referred to as data scientists and data engineers. Data engineers typically provide relevant data in a structure that can be analysed by data scientists to explore and gain insights.
The minister firmly believes data scientists are the strategists of the new businesses and referred data science as the fourth generation of industrial revolution. He dismissed the myth that data science and artificial intelligence will result in job losses, instead he assured that it will create numerous new jobs and improve the economy of the country. Data science is relatively a new field and not many educational institutes world wide are equipped with the curriculum and competencies necessary to train students with the required skills. India already has the largest pool of computer science and mathematics skills and the data science congress envisages to bring India to the center stage in the research and development of data science skills.
