Opportunities and Perils of Data Science

Presented in-person and online via Bluejeans Events on October 15, 2021 att 2:00 p.m. ; Dr. Alfred Z. Spector was most recently CTO and Head of Engineering at Two Sigma, a firm dedicated to algorithmic approaches to a wide collection of financial optimization problems. His career has led him from innovation in large scale, networked computing systems to broad engineering and research leadership. Most recently, he has been writing a book on Data Science, which will be published in early 2022. Spector lectures widely on the growing importance of computer science across all disciplines based on the evocative phrase, CS+X. More recently, he has written and lectured on the societal implications of data science -- both the great benefits and the unintended consequences. ; Runtime: 64:39 minutes ; Data science has provided unprecedented opportunities to learn new insights and to predict, recommend, cluster, classify, transform, and optimize. Catalyzed by large-scale, networked computer systems, vast availability of data, and machine learning algorithms, data science has been extraordinarily impactful to-date, and it holds great promise in all disciplines. However, no new technology arrives without complications, and we have recently seen both the press and various political circles illustrating real, potential, and fictional implications of the field. This presentation aims to balance the opportunities provided by data science against the many challenges that have ensued. At its core, the talk proposes a rubric that practitioners can apply to tease out data science’s complexities and also maps out seven categories of data sciences challenges, ranging from engineering to ethics. The talk is illustrated with examples from many applications, and it concludes with some suggested ways to address the downsides of the field.