Can Anyone Become a Data Scientist? Oxdata Believes So

Visualization for Popular Science magazine by Jer Thorp via Flickr. CC BY 2.0 license.

Data science is a sophisticated and complex discipline, but since it’s still an emerging field, its practitioners come from a wide variety of backgrounds. Typically, though, a background in working with large data sets in a research setting is advantageous. This is why you may find yourself mingling with a former physicist or immunologist at the next data hackathon you attend. New startup 0xdata aims to cast the net even wider, building a widely-accessible statistical analysis tool using Hadoop, R, and Google’s BigQuery.

As Derrick Harris reports at GigaOm, founder SriSatish Ambati is touting the benefits of H20, an “analytics engine” capable of performing sophisticated statistical analysis through a user-friendly front end. “Scientists, data analysts or whoever ultimately uses the product only need to be experts in their domains, not in statistics,” writes Harris. It’s a bold effort, but one that Ambati believes is necessary for widespread adoption of these techniques. Find out more at GigaOm.