Data Science Central – William Vorhies June 12, 2018: “Summary: Data Science is the secret sauce that turns the dumb internet into the smart internet driving changes in society as fast as we drive changes in the internet. The best place to find data on this is Mary Meeker’s Internet Trend Report 2018. Here we use that data to look back at the last year and forward a bit in time to see what impact data science is having. What does the internet run on? It’s been compared to a highway that carries billions of cars. It’s been compared to a vast plumbing system that carries water. It’s been compared to the neurons in a brain that carry electronic impulses. Whether its cars or water or impulses, we all understand those to be a metaphor for data. But does data just go wherever it wants? No. Is it guided by the people who sent it? Not actually. The internet, the one that behaves like streets and highways has crude rules like stop signs, merges, right of way, and maps that tell where and how data can go, or could go. But what makes the internet smart, and really, really valuable is data science. It’s data science that creates the smart rules about

• where to send specific advertising messages
• turning unstructured images, text, and voice signals into smart recognition signals
• speeding up processing by acting on signals at the edge of the system before they even reach their destination
• creating a trust system allowing multiple signals to cooperate
• communicating with us in our native languages
• automating decisions and replacing wrote and repetitive human tasks
• and much, much more.

Without the smart rules created by data science the internet is nothing more than a fancy telephone or telegraph. At best, an information retrieval system but only if you know the specific piece of data you want and exactly where it’s stored..”