As the leaders of a developing field, data scientists must often deal with a frustratingly slippery question: What is data science, precisely, and what is it good for? Alfred Spector is a visiting scholar in the MIT Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS), an influential developer of distributed computing systems and applications, and a successful tech executive with companies including IBM and Google. Along with three co-authors — Peter Norvig at Stanford University and Google, Chris Wiggins at Columbia University and The New York Times, and Jeannette M….
