What goes into the making of a good data scientist

THESE days, it is not just the banks, telecommunications service providers as well as Internet and digital marketing companies that are extracting value out of data, according to Pivotal, a wholly owned subsidiary of EMC Corporation.

Pivotal provides application and data infrastructure software, agile development services and data science consulting. It currently employs some 30 data scientists worldwide, six of whom are based in the Asia-Pacific region, with three of them in Singapore.

Apart from the private sector, the company is also applying Big Data analytics to public-sector use in the Asia-Pacific.

It has collaborated with tax departments on fraud detection, and is working with a city council to enhance traffic control management. Using data collected from various sources, Pivotal detected which underground inductive loops - used for detecting vehicles - ha…