Database Reference
In-Depth Information
Mark Hansen is a good example of somebody who's done great work. In fact,
although he won't admit it, he was using the phrase “data science” through-
out the last 12 years. He's been writing for years about what he often called
“the science of data.” He's been somebody who's been really thinking about
data science as a field much longer than most people. Actually, he worked
with Bill Cleveland at AT&T. Bill Cleveland, in turn, had worked with Tukey, so
there is a nice intellectual tradition there. There's a reason why data science
resonates so much with academics. I feel it's because there's been an academic
foundation there in the applied computational statistics community for half a
century.
David Madigan, who's the former chair of stats at Columbia, is also inspiring.
He is somebody who's done a great job showing the real impact of statistics—
good and bad—on people's lives. All the people I respect are people who
share my value for community. Mark Hansen is trying to build a community
of data journalists at the journalism school. His PhD was in statistics, but now
he's a professor of journalism who is trying to build a community of data jour-
nalists. David Madigan similarly—he was the chair of statistics and now he's
the Executive Vice President for Arts and Sciences at Columbia.
The people I find the most inspiring are the people who think about things in
this order: people—in terms of how you build a strong community; ideas—
which is how you unite people in that community; and things that you use to
build the community that embodies those ideas.
But mostly, I would say my students—broadly construed, at Columbia and at
hackNY—who inspire me.
Gutierrez:
What was it that convinced you to join The New York Times and
try to make a difference when you did your sabbatical?
Wiggins:
It was clear to me by the end of my first day here that we should
build a predictive model for looking at subscriber behavior. I spent some time
interviewing or meeting everyone around here in the company who I felt was
likeminded. I found some good collaborators, worked on this project, and it
was clear from the way people reacted to it that no one had done that before.
I did that without a real clear sense of whether or not I was reinventing a
common wheel.
I got the impression from the way people reacted that people had been sort
of too busy feeding the goat, meaning doing their daily obligations of run-
ning a company, even worse in journalism. In journalism, you have constant
deadlines, but even on the business side, there's a business to run. Nobody
has time to do a two-month research project. I think that's what convinced
me that there really was a lot to be learned from the data that this company
is gathering and curating.
