Data Scientist: The Engineer of the Future

Although our capabilities to store and process data have been increasing exponentially since the 1960-ties, suddenly many organizations realize that survival is not possible without exploiting available data intelligently. Out of the blue, “Big Data” has become a topic in board-level discussions. The abundance of data will change many jobs across all industries. Moreover, also scientific research is becoming more data-driven. Therefore, we reflect on the emerging data science discipline. Just like computer science emerged as a new discipline from mathematics when computers became abundantly available, we now see the birth of data science as a new discipline driven by the torrents of data available today. We believe that the data scientist will be the engineer of the future. Therefore, Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e) established the Data Science Center Eindhoven (DSC/e). This article discusses the data science discipline and motivates its importance.