What is data science? This a question I always ask myself. Even though I am now a year 3 student studying in DSCT major, I am still concerning about the future. How can I pursuit my career with data science?
Let’s start with my own understanding of data science first. Through out the study pathway, we can see that this major can be basically divided into two main fields, one is computer science, which is the technique of programming, and another one is statistic analysis, to make use of data and estimate the parameter that we have interest. I believe a lot of students may have the similar question as mine, how can we apply what we’ve learned from the courses in the real case scenario?
General speaking, I think data science is more often used in financial industry, such as financial investment. Apart from this, it may be also widely applied in information technology, like big data, cloud programming. However, they are quite conceptual to me as I found it hard to dig through the methodology behind them.
2020 is a very unusual year. A world-wide threat is spreading due to the outbreak of corona virus. I start to rethink, how could we apply data science to deal with COVID-19?
Besides the huge efforts of health care workers, I find data science contribute a lot to help with other countries and people in need in different fields. I will specifically discuss two of them and these real-life examples may help us to consider more about our future career.
The first one is the modelling of the virus development and the analysis of the related data, like increasing rate, death cases and expected number of confirmed cases. Almost every country has made their own model to predict the future situation on the spreading of corona virus, which helps them to make decisive actions and implement the corresponding procedures to slow down the rate and to prevent medical system from collapsing. Using modelling as a tool of data science to predict the risk and manage it is one of the application in real-world cases, not only can be used for the control of infected diseases, but also can be used in different scenarios including finance, education, service industries and so on.
Apart from the modelling, a young industry is arising which is the artificial intelligence in medical uses. It also shows its potential in the future. The company Alibaba Group has used the AI technology on the diagnosis of COVID-19. The technology only takes 20 seconds to analysis the CT diagram of the patient and it can also quantify the severity of the diseases. Even this technology is now only developed for the corona virus, but it can be further applied to the whole medical system. This is an application of the combination of big data, cloud programming and machine learning which we will all learn from the courses in DSCT. For our future career, medical AI may be a good choice for us to explore.
