Interaction Breakthroughs in Wrangling Data

While often described as having one of the sexiest jobs today, Data Scientists report spending the majority of their time “wrangling” data, rather than performing analysis per se.  This kind of data drudgery can add enormous friction to data science projects, and it limits the spread of data-driven culture across an organization. It doesn’t have to be that way: new intelligent interaction technologies developed in research are being translated to products in the field, resulting in 10x productivity gains for data scientists, and allowing business analysts to do self-service data wrangling. I will illustrate some of the key ideas using Trifacta, a commercial product that grew out of research at Berkeley and Stanford, which is now in use at major companies in industries ranging from telecommunications to health care to digital marketing and high tech.