Meltwater has a new data science team, located in Meltwater’s Oslo office, close to the infamous Shack 15, the cradle of our company. In this post we want to introduce the team, and the topic of data science.
What is Data Science?
Data Science is an emerging field, with numerous of vague definitions. What they all share is the effort to analyze data using various scientific disciplines, such as Statistics, Machine Learning, Graph Theory, Natural Language Processing and Pattern Recognition, coupled with “Big Data” technologies, typically from the Hadoop eco-system.
As very few people inhabit all of these skills, the goal of every data science team is to get people with varied backgrounds working together. In Meltwater’s newly formed Data Science team we have people with experience in Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning, others from Big Data and Advanced Computing, and last but not least product owners that provide domain expertise and business knowledge, and that define the projects we execute.
In the future, we will be hiring people with backgrounds from statistics, data analysis and machine learning. Look out for an ad in the Jobs section if you’re interested!
Meltwater and Data Science
Here at Meltwater, we are situated close to the ideal location of a data scientist. It’s all about data, data, and again data. We collect data, we analyze data, and we store data. Tons of data, most of it even structured, waiting to be analyzed (well, maybe not tons, assuming the whole internet weighed around 5.7 micrograms in 2007, but still a lot).
One untapped source of information we want to look at in particular, is how user behavior correlates with other data points. Are our clients happy? If not, what do we need to change to make them satisfied?
Other information sources that are independent of the user reside in the data itself: How are documents on the internet related to each other? Or how are people and companies related?
This is definitely not trivial, judging from celebrity news alone! How are Tiger Woods and Elin Nordegreen related for instance? And what about Tom Cruise, Nicole Kidman, Katie Holmes and L. Ron Hubbard?
Heaps of fun challenges lie ahead, and we are eager to get started!
Photo credit: DataScienceDisciplines by Calvin.Andrus (Own work) CC-BY-SA-3.0, via Wikimedia Commons
