Distinguished scientist and former director of the Indian Statistical Institute Sankar K. Pal has said that data analytics, which is a highly multi-disciplinary subject, will create tremendous job opportunities across the globe.
Speaking at the 14th convocation of the National Institute of Technology – Calicut (NIT-C) here on Saturday, Prof. Pal, however, maintained that a big gap had also occurred between the increasing job requirements of data scientists and the availability of qualified data scientists across the world. It was observed that the demand in US was 50% to 60 % greater than its projected supply by 2018.
Quoting Analytics Special Interest Group, set up by NASSCOM a couple of years ago, Prof. Pal said there would be a shortage of around 2,00,000 data scientists in India in the next few years. And, this is one of the critical challenges the era of data science faces today, he added.
Data analytics employs techniques and theories drawn from fields such as mathematics, statistics, information science, and computer science together with various engineering disciplines and application domain knowledge, he said.
He added that data science research primarily focused on acquisition, storage, retrieval, processing, mining, and conversion of data into knowledge. However, the large data is highly complex in nature and capturing, storage, processing, and mining them are not easy tasks. Most information is heterogeneous, time-varying, redundant, biased, uncertain, and imprecise, he observed.
However, Prof. Pal said that to reason, understand, and mine useful knowledge from data was a huge challenge. Data science demanded a revolutionary change in research and methodologies, technologies and tools.
Dr. Sivaji Chakravorti, Director, NIT-C, presented the annual report. A total of 1,572 graduands received degrees at the convocation held at NIT-C auditorium at 4 p.m.