Over the past few decades, the field of computer science has experienced exponential growth and its applications have branched out into nearly every other discipline. With this broad adoption and advancement in new technology came access to an expansive amount of data, as well as the ability and computing power to easily explore these datasets and draw useful conclusions out of them. As a computer science student, I find it fascinating that we are now able to comb through a vast amounts of information, and extract patterns and structures that would have been previously invisible to the humans eye, and I feel as though it has an almost limitless amount of applications. An example of just one of the applications could be pulled from the field of medicine. In recent years, medical researchers have been working to gather and explore data from cancer patients, and have been using it to build a mathematical models that can quickly and accurately detect cancer at an earlier stage in other patients. This would allow for the patient to start treatment before the cancer could spread further, and would significantly increase chances of a successful treatment. Previously, identifying the symptoms for early detection would have been an extremely involved and intensive process, and the end result might have been imprecise. Now with the computing power and data that researchers have access to today, a few computers can do all the heavy lifting, allowing the field to advance at a rapid pace.
As a relatively young field, data science research is being published on an almost daily basis. Cutting edge research is not only coming out of colleges and universities, but technology companies that have recognized its many applications and have been investing in their own research facilities. These researchers investigate generic ways to use large amount of data to draw qualitative conclusions or develop mathematical models, and they spread their findings in journals for other researchers who try to find applications in their respective fields. The continued research into properly and efficiently using the enormous amount of information we have access to is going to continue to allow us to see technology advance at a rate faster than we have ever seen before.
