The New York Times discusses the tremendous demand for data science professionals, and the sources of these professionals. (Mostly computer science programs, of course …)

Bill Howe of UW CSE and the UW eScience Institute gets the last word in the article:

“The question, said Bill Howe, who teaches data science at the University of Washington, is whether it is even possible to instill in a single person all the skills needed, from statistics to predictive modeling to business strategy. The university’s offerings range from a free online course on Coursera to a nine-month certificate program to a Ph.D. track in Big Data.

A vast amount of scientific knowledge is inaccessible to the scientific community due to the lack of computational resources or tools for small laboratories to share or analyze experimental results. With a new grant from the National Science Foundation, the eScience Institute will collaborate with leading institutions to look for ways that software can bring this data out of hiding, revealing untapped value in the “long tail” of scientific research.

The two-year, $500,000 planning grant enables investigators at the Computation Institute (a joint initiative between the University of Chicago and Argonne National Laboratory), University of California, Los Angeles, University of Arizona, University of Washington and University of Southern California to lay the groundwork for a proposed Institute for Empowering Long Tail Research as part of the NSF’s Scientific Software Innovation Institutes program. Researchers will engage with scientists from fields such as biodiversity, economics and metagenomics to determine the optimal solutions for the increasingly challenging data and computational demands upon smaller laboratories.