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Cleaning data is often the primary job of the data scientist, and not necessarily the one they signed up for.  While getting the "words" right with computers is important, it is not fraught with the nuance that getting words right with humans is. Across disciplines the same word can have entirely different meanings and this miscommunication is only one aspect of team building that can go awry.

How do you pick who works together, who reports to whom, and who exchanges information with whom? Usually it gets done within a department, within a project team, or based on some other common ground. It turns out we should be focusing on our differences a bit more.

The goal: investigate huge amounts of research data in new ways. The pool for teams: neuroscientists, data scientists, and software developers. The result: answering questions we didn’t even know we had.

When the United Nations released a report earlier this year that a catastrophic two-degree Celsius (3.6-degree Fahrenheit) rise in global average temperatures is expected to occur in the next decade, there was a media firestorm about the dire predictions. You know who wasn’t surprised? Climate scientists. (Read about the difference a half-a-degree can make.)

“Good ideas are getting harder to find,” Exaptive CEO Dave King quotes a recent paper by MIT and Stanford researchers. He points to the skyrocketing number of researchers employed in the U.S. and contrasts it with the inverse slope on a chart monitoring efficiency of researchers along the same timeline. “Those growing number of researchers are failing to produce value that outpaces what we’re spending to innovate.”

Since Exaptive launched in 2011, we’ve worked with many researchers, particularly in medicine and the natural sciences. PubMed®, a medical journal database, pops up repeatedly as a key tool for these researchers to develop hypotheses. It’s a tool built in a search-and-find paradigm with which we’re all familiar. Execute a keyword search. Get a list of results. Visualization can make search - and, therefore, research - much more meaningful.

Faster is different. It sounds strange at first because we expect faster to be better. We expect faster to be more. If we can analyze data faster, we can analyze more data. If we can network faster, we can network with more people. Faster is more, which is better, but more is different.

So many fantastic quotes are attributed to Albert Einstein. If you hear our CEO Dave King speak, he may bring up his favorite: “Combinatory play seems to be the essential feature in productive thought.” To have an aha moment, we have to play with a challenge from a variety of perspectives. We have to build collaborative teams to tackle complex problems.

One thing we love doing at Exaptive – aside from creating tools that facilitate innovation – is hiring intelligent, creative, and compassionate people to fill our ranks. Frank Evans is one of our data scientists. He was invited to present at the TEDxOU event on January 26, 2018.