In February 2011, over 1,300 people came together for the inaugural O’Reilly Strata Conference in Santa Clara, California. Though representing diverse fields, from insurance to media and high-tech to healthcare, attendees buzzed with a new-found common identity: they were data scientists. Entrepreneurial and resourceful, combining programming skills with math, data scientists have emerged as a new profession leading the march towards data-driven business.

This new profession rides on the wave of big data. Our businesses are creating ever more data, and as consumers we are sources of massive streams of information, thanks to social networks and smartphones. In this raw material lies much of value: insight about businesses and markets, and the scope to create new kinds of hyper-personalized products and services.