“Big data is at the foundation of all of the megatrends that are happening today, from social to mobile to the cloud to gaming.”

– Chris Lynch

The aforementioned quote is something that we strongly believe here at Dataconomy. It’s why we aim to be the most comprehensive source for news, articles and events. There is no doubt that Big Data, and Data Science more broadly, is one of the most interesting and dare we say it, “Hottest”, fields today. As a validation of this, we learnt that the Big Data industry and the EU will be partnering to provide a €2.5B strong impetus to Europe’s future data ambitions. A clear sign that Big Data’s significance will continue to grow.

We also learnt this week that VoloMetrix has secured $12M to help companies use data to match employee performance with the rest of the organisation. This could certainly be an interesting idea that companies might move towards in the future.

And if privacy is a concern of yours, then you’ll be happy to know that Blackphone, dubbed “The World’s Most Secure Smartphone”, revealed that an Android Tablet is on its way!

To find out more about latest happenings in the Data Science Space, below is our selection of top stories!

TOP DATACONOMY ARTICLES

How to Become a Data Scientist in 12 Weeks with Metis

We caught up with Jason Moss (Co-founder of Metis) and John Harnisher (VP of Data, Analytics and Insight at Kaplan) to discuss the new Data Science course at Metis. Metis offers comprehensive courses in digital practices, designed to teach the skills needed to succeed in an increasingly digital world.

Four Routes to Becoming a Data Scientist

It‘s true to say that the leading Data Science professionals are frighteningly intelligent Ph.D qualified Masters of the Universe. They have been at the cutting edge of this fast developing industry for the last few years. They have increasingly large and complex teams around them, many of whom have done Masters in Data Science or Computing, but as the years go by yet more are entering the industry from other routes.

What You Should Know About Your App Data, But Probably Don’t

To tap into apps, users must first sign up. The pesky asterisk deems your full name, email, date of birth as compulsory information, but also often gender, a ZIP/postal code, address, phone number and – if you are using a subscription service – bank card details. This is easily enough information to create a sketchy profile on any individual – and that is before you start using their service. When that begins, you will be, whether you realise it or not, voluntarily offering the company snippets into your day to day life, primarily intended for people you actually know.

TOP DATACONOMY NEWS

IBM Looks to Enhance Bluemix Usership With New Developer-Centric APIs for Watson

IBM has now introduced a set of new cognitive services that will be available on IBM Bluemix, its cloud-based platform for mobile and web app development. Bluemix users will utilize an evolving set of APIs and content to build apps, with little effort in entry to cognitive tools, powered by Watson.

Big Data Industry and EU partner to Provide €2.5B Strong Impetus to Europe’s Future Data Ambitions

The European Commission in conjunction with the European Data industry has pledged €2.5 billion in a public-private partnership (PPP) in order to reinforce Europe’s data sector.The EU will contribute €500 million of the tax-payer’s money over the next five years, to the industry consortium’s €2 billion purse.

Google Now Incorporating Cloud Based Prediction API to Smart-Fill Your Spreadsheets

Google’s latest is an Add-on that uses machine learning to make predictions in Google Sheets. Dubbed Smart Autofill, the add-on uses the already available spreadsheet data to learn patterns and predicts the missing entries. It is unlike the standard “Autofill” feature of Sheets, which is capable of filling in simple values like calendar dates, days of the week, ordered numbers, etc.

Upcoming Events

20-21 October, 2014- Analytics 2014, Las Vegas

 The Analytics 2014 Conference is designed for statisticians, analysts, data scientists, forecasters, data miners, and their managers, from all major industries including health and life sciences, education, financial services, government, telecommunications, insurance, retail, utilities, and manufacturing. Last year’s event drew nearly 1,000 attendees from hundreds of organizations.

21-22 October, 2014- Visualise Your World Conference 2014, London

Everyone has data. But it’s how you use your data that makes a difference. Come to our Visualise Your World event, and you’ll learn everything you need to know to visualise your data and find insights that matter. Industry experts will share their perspectives on hot topics such as data visualisation, big data, and data governance in keynotes and breakout sessions.

Top Dataconomy Jobs

Senior Analyst / Junior Project Manager

The company’s positive development rests on a performance-based business model aiming to improve the consumers’ experience. The zanox Group currently has branches in Germany, England, France, Spain, Italy, Sweden, the Netherlands, USA, Brazil and Poland. The group consists of zanox AG, Digital Window Ltd., eprofessional GmbH and Metrigo GmbH. Our shareholders are Axel Springer SE (52,5 %) and the Swiss based PubliGroupe AG (47,5 %).

Data Scientist

Teleport Data Scientist finds, scrapes, fuses, structures, visualizes and builds our growing pool of data that we use to power our search engine for digital nomads. We’ll never have perfect data for the entire planet, but thanks to you we’ll able to give useful responses to location searches anyway. We don’t expect every candidate to check all these boxes. What you don’t know, you should be self-motivated to learn. We hope you can show us a glimpse into that ability already during your work on the test task.

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IBM has now introduced a set of new cognitive services that will be available on IBM Bluemix, its cloud-based platform for mobile and web app development.

Bluemix users will utilize an evolving set of APIs and content to build apps, with little effort in entry to cognitive tools, powered by Watson. This will help “accelerate, enhance, and scale human expertise for confident decision making,” reports a news release.

The eight new services available through Bluemix include:

• User Modeling utilizes linguistic analytics to analyze any public communication the user makes available such as text messages, tweets, posts, email, and more, helping with a more personal interaction by analyzing personality and social traits.
• Machine Translation converts text input in one language into a destination language for the end user. Translation is available among English, Brazilian Portuguese, Spanish and French.
• Language Identification detects the language in which text is written and helps in translation, voice to text conversion, or direct analysis, and has capabilities with 15 languages.
• Concept Expansion analyses text and interprets its meaning based on usage in other similar contexts. It can be used to create a dictionary of related words and concepts so that euphemisms, colloquialisms, or otherwise unclear phrases can be better understood and analyzed.
• Message Resonance analyzes draft content and scores how well it is likely to be received by a specific target audience. Today, analysis can be done against people active in cloud computing or big data discussions but future versions will let users provide their own community data.
• Relationship Extraction parses sentences into their various components and detects relationships between the components so that users or analytics engines can more easily understand the meaning of individual sentences and documents.
• Question & Answer Interprets and answers user questions directly based on primary data sources that have been selected and gathered into a body of data or “corpus.” The service returns candidate responses with associated confidence levels and links to supporting evidence.
• Visualization Rendering: Takes input data and graphically renders it as an interactive visualization that can be customized to match needs, visual styling, and types of data being analyzed.

The Watson APIs supports Java, Node.js/JavaScript, and Ruby, with examples included for each writes Serdar Yegulalp of InfoWorld. Bluemix is available at 30 days free, and up to 1,125 GB-hours free each month thereafter providing developers with enough window to know the usefulness of Watson’s API offerings, he says.

He further explains, two aspects determine how well Bluemix fares in the near future, since the availability of its APIs outside seems unlikely : how quickly the individual offerings expand (such as more languages for Machine Translation) and how many more APIs are rolled out in the months to come.

Read more here.

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