Inc Magazine recently reported on 6 Major Tech Innovations for 2012. I was surprised to see how much influence data science has on the list. I would say 4 of the 6 technologies are data science related.

  1. Predictive Technology – Data Science and Statistics are the driving force here, along with all the data that is now being collected
  2. Social Analytics – Yet another example of data science and statistics.  Analyzing social networks has become a hot topic.
  3. Speech for Business – This is putting Natural Language Processing (NLP) to work.  The best example is Siri from the iPhone.  Siri is constantly learning because of all the data collected when answering questions.  This area is covered with data science topics (NLP, machine learning, data storage/retrieval).  The end goal is to be able to use data science to help the business.
  4. Business Ready Storage – This might be more hardware related, but data needs to be stored quickly and securely.  It also needs to be available and in a format useful for reporting.

Can you think of other ways data science is being used for innovation?