In recent years, the field of data science has exploded into the mainstream, and into our daily lives. Data science now touches nearly every aspect of society and affects how governments, the private sector, the healthcare profession, and many other vital sectors operate.
It’s for that reason that four data science experts—including Jeannette Wing, Columbia executive vice president for research and professor of computer science, and associate professor of applied mathematics and systems biology Chris Wiggins—decided to write Data Science in Context: Foundations, Challenges, Opportunities, a new book on the state of the field published this fall. They worked with co-authors Peter Norvig, a fellow at Stanford’s Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence Institute who previously served as director of research and search quality at Google, and Alfred Spector, a visiting scholar at MIT who worked as vice president of research and special initiatives at Google. Columbia News caught up with Wing and Wiggins to discuss how the book got off the ground, and what it aims to say about data science today and in the future.
