“Open Source Data Science becoming crucial for Businesses & Governments” – Dr. Graham Williams

TechnoparkToday.com(May, 2015): Open Source tools for Data Science domains such as Data Mining, Analytics & Big Data, previously used mostly by the IT Industry, is increasingly becoming important for Governments around the world, said Dr. Graham Williams, PhD, Data Scientist at Togaware and the Australia Taxation Office. He was speaking at the 3-day Workshop on “Data Mining & Analytics with R”, organized by the International Centre for Free and Open Source Software (ICFOSS).

The global data science market is projected to be worth $320 billion by 2020. Further, according to McKinsey, there will be shortage of over 180,000 data scientists in the US by 2018, reflecting the explosive rate of growth of the sector. Almost all the large IT corporations such as Amazon, Ebay, Google, Facebook and LinkedIn are today as much data science companies as they are domain companies.

Data mining is the process of excavating data in an attempt to uncover hitherto-unknown but useful patterns, particularly in large datasets. Data mining strives to discover new insights & knowledge and to develop predictive models. R is the most widely-used Data Mining and analytics too globally for statistics and data science. R is today being used in different disciplines such as Retail, Financial Services, Health research, weather modeling, astronomy, psychology, and social sciences.

Around the world, as computerization becomes common in Governments, the enormous volumes of data are generated. Open Source Data Science tools such R are of immense use in this context, given their significant power, very low cost, rapid adoption of new technology, vibrant communities and license-free regimes. Governments were increasingly applying data science tools such as Data Minining, Analytics & Visualization on massive datasets to uncover patterns of interest including fraud and tax evasion. The Australian Government uses R for data mining at the Australian Tax office, Immigration and Border Control and Health & Human Services. As more Governments join the Open Data movement, it is expected that the use of R will increase even further.

Mr. Satish Babu, Director, ICFOSS, who spoke at the occasion, pointed out that “Given the explosive growth of the Data Science domain, it is not surprising that numerous start-ups around the world are creating business models around iofessionals, and the fast-growing business opportunities in R, better training could help India to leverage the potential of this domain.”

The 3-day workshop organized by ICFOSS has attracted significant attention from the IT Industry, researchers, students and government officers, with 70 participants attending the 3-day workshop. The workshop will conclude on 7th May 2015.