Sydney Uni's new head of IT talks data science Wednesday, 15 February 2017

Technological advances are not only having an impact in the business world, but also on how IT is taught at university, such as a greater focus on data and data science. This will result in a major shift in research, according to Athman Bouguettaya (pictured) from the University of Sydney.

“In the old days, science was conducted from observation. You made a hypothesis and then you went off and ascertained it using whatever data you had,” he said.

“Now we have the reverse situation, where observations are going to come from the data. We collect so much data – we’re doing it from the bottom up rather than the top down. That is going to open exciting new areas of research.”

With his recent appointment as head of IT at the University of Sydney, Bouguettaya is hoping to prepare students for this new future and help them unleash a wave of innovation by taking a multi-pronged approach.

One of the key elements of this will be understanding the environment that we live in and the kind of students, such as the Millenials, that the university is training.

“In my own days, the dream that we had was to graduate and be employed by major companies like the IBMs and so on,” Bouguettaya said.

“These days, things have changed. A lot of the students we train aspire to be the Bill Gates and the Mark Zuckerbergs.”

The question is how to train students like this, where it’s no longer just about technical skills but how to equip them with ‘soft’ skills as well.

These soft skills include teaching students how to communicate with venture capitalists in order to get them to invest in their startup company.

“The idea there is that the way we’re going to train this generation is going to be fundamentally different from the way we’ve done that in the past. These people will actually change the world because now the sky is the limit in terms of what they can do,” Bouguettaya said.

Today’s students also differ in that they are now equipped with a wealth of knowledge, which means the role of a teacher will change from being a custodian of the truth to a moderator of the truth, according to Bouguettaya.

This is going to impact on how education is taught and modes of communication between the teacher and the student.

“[Students are] connected 24 hours a day. There’s a higher expectation in terms of how we respond – they’re all on Facebook. We need to adapt to that type of environment,” he said.

These changes are even impacting on something as simple as email.

Bouguettaya related a story about his son, who he said he would contact – Bouguettaya was living in Melbourne and his son was in Canberra.

“I sent him an email and after a few days, he hadn’t responded. I called him up and I said, ‘Why haven’t you sent me what I had asked you to send me?’” Bouguettaya said.

His son told him he only checks his email if someone tells him to – his primary communication is through Facebook instead.

“[For him], email is just an ancient thing. I think it brought home that I’m actually dealing with a Millennial,” Bouguettaya said.

But he warned of not fighting or resisting these changes, because they are already happening.

“What it means for us is that we need to prepare students for jobs that haven’t been created yet because it’s moving so fast,” he said.

World of sensing

Bouguettaya is excited by current developments in the world of sensing and how to take data and analyse and use it to do things that 10 years ago were in the realm of science fiction.

Just like the iPhone revolutionised how we communicate, so will these new developments based on sensing.

But while devices can collect a multitude of information, the question is how to leverage that data.

One area of potential is managing infrastructure such as roads, buildings or health facilities, according to Bouguettaya, with the availability of instantaneous data.

“Then you can predict what’s going to happen in the future. For instance, how your infrastructure is being used. What that means is you can have predictive models,” he said.

This data could also be used in a business sense, such as managing a shopping centre by factoring in information such as population growth.

“You can then use evidence-based data to actually determine how you’re going to meet the demands of tomorrow,” Bouguettaya said.

“We used to make the excuse in the past that we didn’t have enough data to make predictive models. Not anymore – it’s there.”

But Bouguettaya said there are still issues that need to be worked out, such as privacy and security, and that we haven’t reached the full potential of big data yet.

For example, he said a lot of the data that we collect is “garbage.” The challenge is sorting through this to work out what’s useful.

Bouguettaya predicted this is not far off, and could happen as soon as the next couple of years.

“I think we live in exciting times. What that means is that we have an opportunity to innovate,” he said.

“I always liken the IT era now to the physics era in the earlier 20th century, where you had discoveries almost on a weekly basis. I think we are in that type of era right now.”