Shape the Future
The hot tech gig of 2022: Data scientist
January 6, 2012: 5:00 AM ETBy the end of the decade 50 billion devices will be emitting information nonstop. Data scientists will help manage it all.
D.J. Patil: "If you can't measure it, you can't fix it."
FORTUNE -- A decade from now the smart techies who decided to become app developers may wish they had taken an applied-mathematics class or two. The coming deluge of data (more on that in a moment) will create demand for a new kind of computer scientist -- a gig that's one part mathematician, one part product-development guru, and one part detective.
D.J. Patil is a pioneer in the field of data science, a new discipline that aims to organize and make sense of all the data generated by machines. It's a challenge that will grow exponentially over the next decade.
Tech in 2012: Face-offs, failures and fairly big changes at the office
Today there are some 400 million devices connected to the Internet, mostly phones and computers. By 2020 some 50 billion devices, from cars to appliances, will be talking to one another. And companies will need teams of data scientists like Patil to sort through everything from internal inventory metrics to customer tweets. The role is so important that Greylock Partners has hired Patil to serve as a "data scientist in residence" to help its portfolio companies mine their data for patterns or stats that will make them more efficient or smarter than their competitors.
Patil understands the business value of data science -- he was LinkedIn's (LNKD) chief scientist for three years -- but he brings a mathematician's logic to the job. His mantra? "If you can't measure it, you can't fix it."
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This article is from the January 16, 2012 issue of Fortune.
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4 new ways to solve the energy challenge
4. Tapping fuel from the ocean floor
In the race to find an economically viable biofuel, researchers are now looking at a surprising source: seaweed. While making cheap fuel from pond algae has proved difficult, the potential advantages of seaweed, or macro-algae, are big. It's one of the world's fastest-growing plants, doesn't need fertilizer, requires less acreage than land-based crops (plus, no clear-cutting to make way for farms), and its fuel would emit MORE
Jan 5, 2012 5:00 AM ET -
4 new ways to solve the energy challenge
2. Harnessing the sun's power
Ever since cold fusion flopped spectacularly, the idea of finding an affordable way of replicating the sun's method of generating energy has become almost a joke. That may be about to change. Yes, the two major fusion reactor designs being explored in the research world -- one is called a tokamak and the other is inertial confinement systems -- show promise, but they are 20 to MORE
Jan 5, 2012 5:00 AM ET -
4 new ways to solve the energy challenge
3. Creating electricity in space
The idea of beaming solar power down to Earth from space was popularized in a 1941 Isaac Asimov short story in which the machinery was controlled by a robot called Cutie. Today, solar space stations still sound far-fetched, but scientists in the U.S. and Japan are pursuing modern versions of the system, which are becoming more feasible as space flight and solar panels promise to become MORE
Jan 5, 2012 5:00 AM ET -
4 new ways to solve the energy challenge
In labs around the globe, scientists are working on radical technologies, from 500-mile car batteries to solar space farms.
By Stuart F. Brown and Anne VanderMey
1. Building a 500-mile car battery
The holy grail in the electric-car world is beating range anxiety: the fear you'll run out of juice in the middle of nowhere. Today's electrics, like the Nissan Leaf, have a range of about 100 miles, but scientists at IBM (IBM) are in MORE
Jan 5, 2012 5:00 AM ET
