CIO OPINION
CIO opinion
“
THE USE OF AI
IN THE LIKES OF
HEALTHCARE
WILL NECESSITATE
PURPOSE-BUILT
PLATFORMS THAT ARE NOT
ONLY TECHNOLOGICALLY
ADVANCED BUT
SCIENTIFICALLY NUANCED.
/////////////////
Dr Jabe Wilson, Consulting Director of Text and Data
Analytics, Elsevier
Preparing for the future:
Supporting data science
as an art
As artificial intelligence
becomes more prevalent within
the workplace, it’s important
to grasp an understanding
of how to handle data in
relation to AI performance.
We hear from Dr. Jabe Wilson,
Consulting Director of Text and
Data Analytics at Elsevier, who
provides an insight into the
workings of data science and
how it affects machine learning.
T
he idea of programming and data science as an art is not new.
The ideology can be traced back to the founding of computer
science as a discipline. It is mentioned in the 1959 statement
of purposes at the founding of the Communication of the ACM and
was put forward as a positive characteristic in a famous article from
1974. The article supported the idea, ‘because it applies accumulated
knowledge to the world, because it requires skill and ingenuity,
and especially because it produces objects of beauty’. This way of
thinking has become increasingly important in recent years as AI has
grown in influence.
In a talk I recently gave at Bio-IT World, I shared some lessons from the
experience of data scientists at Elsevier – specifically, why it is an art
and how to support the data scientists, which then enables us to better
support customers of Elsevier. The underlying message is that we must
support programming and data science as it is experienced rather than
with an idealised view of the practice.
Growing from experience
The thinking behind data science being seen as an art form echoes my
own experiences growing up in a household of artists and programming
from an early age. The art-based approach is where you understand a
problem more fully over time by progressively working on alternative
solutions which lead to a deeper understanding of the problem itself.
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