Come with me on a journey!

Data mining, and Data Science is an exciting emerging field in software engineering. I say exciting because it's like panning for gold, with volumes of simple data potentially hiding previously unknown facts about human behavior, weather patterns and planet health, human health and more. Take the human genome, it's just a big set of data that you can put on your hard drive with access to all of it, but we don't know which bit is important for curing which illnesses. Imagine to go panning through the sea of human genomes and pull out a gem!

So I'm Adam, and I love data.

This last month I've been challenged by some reasonably hard data problems, and some exciting new ideas. I was asked today whether or not I have a new-year's resolution, and I said 'no' as I tend to think new-year's resolutions are largely self-defeating. But when I think about it, there is something I would like to get better at this year - data. I want to get better at solving hard problems and I want to make a contribution. I want to see where whatever ideas and creativity I have will take me!

Working in software has taught me that success must be measurable, quantitative, otherwise how do you measure your progress against it? So to that end, this blog is the answer to my new years resolution. I want to learn something substantial about Data Science every two weeks, and I want to write about them here. If I can make 26 postings about interesting areas of Data Science, then I will have learned something substantial and improved myself over the year.

The source of this fresh passion over the past few months comes essentially from one guy whom I have huge respect for in the field of software engineering. He's a fantastic orator and in the past written some interesting articles on his blogger, as well as made some wonderful blunders. He's been a keynote at various O'Rielly conferences over the past few years as he's both intelligent and funny, and seems to be on a different wavelength to most. He usually presents from a new interesting perspective in a way that challenges thinking rather than delivers information (and I would think that should have a much more lasting effect on the audience!). OSCON Data in 2011 was no exception, and even though he isn't a 'Data Guy', he gave this great presentation...

So I was challenged, and then I saw this video on reddit.com a few weeks ago which talks about what Data Science is, and why it's such a rare skill.

So come with me on an exciting adventure to learn more about Data Science, Data Mining, and Data Analysis; and become prepared to solve the hard problems with big data sets and fun math!

Adam.