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Data Science

Data science is used to help businesses make better decisions. Watch Hedieh Ranjbartabar talk about Data Science and introduce some key vocabulary.
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Welcome to the first week of English for Technology. This course will introduce you to some of the key English vocabulary for technology and give you opportunities to review and practise new words. This week, you will focus on data science. This video is a basic introduction to data science and some of its key vocabulary. So what is data science? To answer this question, let me welcome your technology trainer, Hedieh. Thanks, Tim. Data science is the use of data to get valuable or useful information that helps organisations to solve problems and make decisions. For example, a hospital might want to know which groups in society go to hospital most often.
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A bank may want to know which products are popular with different customers. Data science can be used to find answers to these questions and to help improve businesses. Data science is a large field. It combines different areas of knowledge, including computer science, maths, statistics and business.
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So what is data? Well, data is any facts, figures or information that is usually stored or kept on a computer. The growth of the Internet has led to a large increase in the amount of data. This means there’s more data that can be analysed.
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Data comes in different forms. For example, it can be structured or unstructured. Structured data is organised. The data has labels and it can be presented in a table like this. Unstructured data is not organised. This kind of data comes in a variety of formats such as videos, audio and text. Examples of unstructured data are social media posts, business documents and customer feedback.
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The people who work in data science are called data scientists. The job of a data scientist is to use data to help businesses to gain insight and make good decisions and insight is a clear understanding of a complicated problem. For example, what do customers want from a product? A data scientist could analyse structured and unstructured data from customer feedback to help to answer these questions. Data science has a process which can be used to answer important business questions. This process is often divided into these six steps. Business understanding, data understanding, data preparation, modelling, evaluation and deployment. You will look at these steps in more detail in the next video.
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In this video, you heard some key vocabulary for data science. In the next step, you will review and practise this vocabulary.

In this video, Hedieh introduced the topic of data science.

Now we are going to have a look at the pronunciation of some of the key vocabulary from the video.

During the course, we will show you the stressed syllable and the word form of key words.

Stressed Syllable
The stressed (or emphasised) syllable is the part of the word that you say a bit louder or longer. It is shown below each word like this:

the word 'analyse' showing the stressed syllable

Word Form
The word form describes what kind of word it is. For example, a noun or a verb. During the course, you will see these abbreviations for different word forms.

  • (n.) = noun
  • (v.) = verb
  • (adj.) = adjective
  • (adv.) = adverb

Vocabulary

Listen to this key vocabulary from the video and practise the pronunciation.

analyse (v.)
/A – na – lyse/
format (n.)
/FOR – mat/
customer feedback (n.)
/CUS – to – mer/ /FEED – back/
insight (n.)
/IN – sight/
data science (n.)
/DA – ta/ /SCI – ence/
social media (n.)
/SO – cial/ /ME – di – a/
data scientist (n.)
/DA – ta/ /SCI – en – tist/
structured data (n.)
/STRUC – tured/ /DA – ta/
data (n.)
/DA – ta/
unstructured data (n.)
/un – STRUC – tured/ /DA – ta/

Discussion

Which vocabulary from the video was new for you?

Did you find it difficult to hear or say the correct stressed syllable in any of the words?

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English for STEM: Understanding Technology Vocabulary

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