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Evolution of Sciences: New Data Science Era

• Before 1600: Empirical science
• 1600-1950s: Theoretical science
• Each discipline has grown a theoretical component. Theoretical models often motivate experiments and generalize our understanding.
• 1950s-1990s: Computational science
• Over the last 50 years, most disciplines have grown a third, computational branch (e.g. empirical, theoretical, and computational ecology, or physics, or linguistics.)
• Computational Science traditionally meant simulation. It grew out of our inability to find closed-form solutions for complex mathematical models.
• 1990-now: Data science
• The flood of data from new scientific instruments and simulations
• The ability to economically store and manage petabytes of data online
• The Internet and computing Grid that makes all these archives universally accessible
• Scientific info. management, acquisition, organization, query, and visualization tasks scale almost linearly with data volumes
• Data mining is a major new challenge!
• Jim Gray and Alex Szalay, The World Wide Telescope: An Archetype for Online Science, Comm. ACM, 45(11): 50-54, Nov. 2002