“Data Science” and “Big Data”

Abstract

The quantity, diversity and availability of transport data is increasing rapidly, requiring new skills in the management and interrogation of data and databases. Recent years have seen a new wave of “Data Science”, “big data” and “smart cities” sweeping though the Transport sector. Transportation professionals and researchers now need to be able to use data and databases in order to establish quantitative, empirical facts, and to validate and challenge their mathematical models, whose axioms have traditionally often been assumed rather than rigorously tested against data. In 2012, the Harvard Business Review described Data Science as “the sexiest job of the 21st century”, and in 2011 consultancy McKinsey predicted demand for 1.5 million new jobs in Data Science. While the term with its current meaning has been in use since 1996, it only began to appear as a common Silicon Valley job title from around 2008, and is now a buzzword. The term “big data” is similarly omnipresent in the world’s media, used by most journalists, though not by most academic researchers, as a synonym for “Data Science”. What are these apparently new disciplines which have ascended so rapidly? And how much is hype which simply re-packages much older work in related fields such as Statistics and Computer Science?