I came across the following statements related to “Data Science” topic which (although interdisciplinary in its nature) becomes a buzzword (I believe in Software Engineering too):

“The sexy job in the next ten years will be statisticians… The ability to take data—to be able to understand it, to process it, to extract value from it, to visualize it, to communicate it—that’s going to be a hugely important skill.” (Hal Varian, Google’s Chief Economist interviewed in the McKinsey Quarterly)

“Data Science is a valuable rebranding of computer science and applied statistics skills” (David Smith)

“Data science is clearly a blend of the hackers’ arts…; statistics and machine learning…; and the expertise in mathematics and the domain of the data for the analysis to be interpretable… It requires creative decisions and open-mindedness in a scientific context.” (Hilary Mason and Chris Wiggins in  Taxonomy of Data Science)

“…data scientist: those who use both data and science to create something new.“  (DJ Patil in Building data science teams)

Two renowned researchers joined the Editorial Board of e-Informatica Software Engineering Journal (EISEJ) this week:

1) Professor Norman Fenton

Professor Head, Computer Science RADAR (Risk Assessment and Decision Analysis) Group Computer Science Department Faculty of Informatics and Mathematical Sciences, Queen Mary University of London

2) Dr Guenther Ruhe

An Industrial Research Chair in Software Engineering at University of Calgary

As it should be my recommendation, I am ready to recommend only persons who I know personally.

This Tuesday you are going to participate in a workshop inspired by CodeRetreat format ( http://coderetreat.org/ ).

Before the workshop, please prepare yourself by following those steps:

• Read and think about this article: http://www.jbrains.ca/permalink/the-four-elements-of-simple-design
• Write working implementation of Game of Life ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway’s_Game_of_Life )
• a) Your program should allow user to set initial state of a board via graphical user interface
• b) User should be able to see subsequent states of a game by pressing “next” button.
• Optional: Watch http://agile.dzone.com/videos/pair-programming-show

Our discussion will be based on knowledge you gain by reading the article. By implementing GoL beforehand, you will familiarize yourself with a problem, which will allow us to make best use of our short time available during a workshop.

Best regards,
Grzegorz Dziemidowicz
Nokia