By Mikaela Ergas-Lenett, Operations & Education Manager @ Data Culture

Nothing is more rewarding or inspiring than bringing new young minds into the data science field. We sat down with five of the brightest 14–18 year old future data science leaders to learn about their aspirations for the future.

Mikaela: What were your entry points into data?

Katherine: My interest in data actually started through Instagram. I started seeing different social activist data visualizations pop-up on my feed from people like @monachalbi and @giorgialupi. It made me really want to know more about the field of data in general.

Anum…

Q: What is Data Culture Studio? What inspired Data Culture to create a Studio?

DC Studio is Data Culture’s visualization and storytelling studio. We specialize in building interactive narratives and telling compelling stories with data.

We’ve always been passionate about data viz, and we found ourselves taking on more and more projects where there was an opportunity to craft a narrative from start to finish. The more organizations we worked with, the more we realized telling visual, data-driven stories is a critical need across industries. We also looked at our team and realized we had a truly unique combination of…

By Alexa Garrison, Director of Data Analytics @ Convene

Over the last decade, large technology companies like Netflix, Google, and Spotify have set the standard for building data organizations with well-defined roles and responsibilities. Their robust organizations are hallmarked by wide-sprawling teams of data engineers, data scientists and data governance professionals all working together with different specializations. Everything from the ETL pipeline, data integrity and privacy, analytics dashboards, and machine learning optimization is expertly managed and maintained from a centralized org with clear data strategy leadership.

While we know what a robust data organization should look like, it is much…

By Nicole Maffeo and Catherine Williams, Google AI Research team

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the authors, and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of their employer

What are your predictions for the field of data in the new year?

Data fairness, the democratization of AI, and increased investments in the integration of data management into ML-Ops will all likely be key in 2021.

Fairness is at the cornerstone of Responsible ML. Fair datasets make fair models. Algorithmic bias is one the biggest problems in making AI driven products, and it’s very hard to battle as an afterthought. …

Data Culture Co-Founders Leah Weiss and Gabi Steele on their first year in business and the future of data.

I’m curious how you would describe “Data Culture” and what it means to both of you?

L: It’s an important question, because “Data Culture” isn’t necessarily a destination where one day you’ll have arrived, it’s a process you undertake. Your data will never be 100% perfect, and you will always be iterating. But no matter how mature you are as a data organization, in a data-driven culture, employees at every level should be able to surface opportunities for more-informed decision making…

By Gabi Steele, Leah Weiss & Barr Moses

As businesses increasingly leverage data-driven decision making, the ability to use and understand data at the company-wide level becomes mission critical. While tech behemoths like Netflix, Airbnb, and Spotify have strong data cultures built over the last decade, most companies often face challenges getting up and running with data. Data Culture co-founders and former WeWork data leads Gabi Steele and Leah Weiss, and Monte Carlo CEO and co-founder Barr Moses share what it takes to make an impact with data at your company.

It’s 2 a.m. You’ve been staring at an Excel…