Amazon's John Rauser: What is a Data Scientist?

John Rauser, a principal engineer and data scientist at Amazon, discusses careers in big data at the O'Reilly Strata Conference in September in New York City. In this video, he shares the story of the world's first data scientist, 18th century German astronomer Tobias Mayer, and then narrates his own 18-year journey through the fields of software engineering, math and statistics. He posits that five areas are essential skills to the data scientist: math, engineering, writing, skepticism and curiosity. For those looking to hire data scientists, Rauser says it is hard to identify them, and you may have to "grow them" yourself. This video runs about 17 minutes.

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