Building a Data Science Program at NASA/JPL with Visual Analysis

Exploring the universe generates a huge amount of data.

And when we’re talking about the data that we face every day, we’re talking about a set of satellites that are processing and sending data day and night throughout the day.

The technologies for data exchange, as well as their sources, are getting bigger and more diverse, with laser information exchange almost happening, and how can we look at these data up close?

What mysteries exist in them?

We need to process them quickly to understand what we’re observing but don’t understand.

Just like dark matter, Rob Witoff proposes that the information we collect is actually dark data, until we can extract as much hidden or obscured information from so many data.

The NASA works for a long time extracting/capturing data and transforming it into power in the hands of specialists, so we can make decisions faster.

According to Harvard Business Review Data Scientist, it’s the most <a title=“Data Scientist:

The Sexiest Job of the 21st Century” href=“http://hbr.org/2012/10/data-scientist-the-sexiest-job-of-the-21st-century/ar/1" target=”_blank">sexy do século 21.

The role of the Data Scientist is first to facilitate the release of data, and provide sharing for us to create an unimaginable force around a set of data that allows us to process and extract the sense from our dark data.

Today it’s much simpler to work with large masses of data than it was in the past, we have many services on demand, we have strong integration between professionals and amateurs (Pro-Am), which can drive information discovery.

So the search for sharing is very necessary.

Next, the Data Scientist should be guided by the idea of driving/facilitating specialists to discover and make decisions about real data.

First, asking experts questions, working with data, and bringing it back again, so they can look at, see, research, and fail as quickly as possible, iterating over masses and more masses of data.

There are now a set of simple tools that facilitate the extraction of information within our dark data, and once we have them, we can plot them and make them simpler for experts to manipulate and follow at any moment. Next, the Data Scientist should infuse all knowledge, so that other people can discover and analyze information, manipulating it in the best possible way. The Data Scientist should take knowledge to a larger number of information, so they can transform it.

Inside NASA, they have some programs that allow scientists, startups, and others to immerse themselves in data and information and finally share them with experts who will validate them and ultimately generate more knowledge for the public.

Showcasing information in a different way is generating an increasingly higher value on discoveries made by NASA, why can’t we release our company’s data, empower the community and experts not just with data but also with information, and help the community transform it?

That’s the end of Rob Witoff’s presentation. http://qconsp.com/keynote/building-data-science-program-nasajpl-visual-analytics