Honorary Lecture 'Data Science: The Science of Big Data' by Wil van der Aalst

On May 28 HSE Honorary Professor, Professor at the Technical University of Eindhoven, Wil van der Aalst delivers a lecture on 'Data Science: The Science of Big Data'.

Abstract:

Society shifted from being predominantly "analog" to "digital" in just a few years. This has had an incredible impact on the way we do research, the way we do business, and the way we communicate. Data is collected about anything, at any time, and at any place. Although our capabilities to store and process data have been increasing exponentially since the 1960-ties, it now becomes clear that a new discipline is developing. Just like computer science emerged as a new discipline from mathematics when computers became abundantly available, we now see the birth of data science as a new discipline driven by the torrents of data available today. We believe that the data scientist will emerge as an important new job. Although data science also involves other disciplines (industrial engineering, social sciences, electrical engineering, industrial design, etc.) its roots are clearly in mathematics and computer science. It is interesting to see how data science bridges the classical divide between mathematics and computer science. See for example the relation between data mining and statistics, the relation between operations research and process mining, and the relation between optimization and distributed algorithms.

In his talk, Wil van der Aalst provides an overview of Data Science: "The Science of Big Data". He discusses the paradigm shifts needed in research (in particular in computer science) and the many open challenges in Data Science. Process mining is used as an example to illustrate that the alignment between observed behavior and modeled behavior is crucial.