Via TP (Techcrunch) :

Today, Silicon Valley is the hottest place for quants to be – though people with this skill set are often referred to now as data scientists. A similar confluence of factors — data, technology and algorithms — has combined to enable a new class of transformational opportunities. These opportunities are not limited to just financial services; they are showing up in every sector of the economy.

The volume and variety of data sources has exploded, with companies now regularly directly capturing all manner of user web and mobile traffic, e-commerce and real-world transactions, social profile information, location and even sensor data. In addition, there are vast pools of third-party data available through APIs for everything from advertising and beauty to yellow pages and ZIP codes.

Consequently, tech companies are lusting after all manners of data scientists with the biggest companies (Google, Facebook, Baidu, Microsoft, etc.) already having made early acquisitions in machine/deep learning. However, these acquisitions may largely be used just to fuel their existing businesses in search, social and other applications inside their enterprises.

There are many, many more real-world problems to solve. The hunt is on across both horizontal business functions like sales, marketing, finance and security, as well as vertical industries such as retail, manufacturing, healthcare and even transportation. The Holy Grail here is finding patterns and insights where we didn’t know they existed.