Don't look for unicorns, build a data science team

When it comes to big data, one thing seemingly everyone can agree on is that organizations face a shortfall of data science talent. After all, the ideal data scientists aren't just wunderkinds in advanced mathematics and statistics, they're creative, non-linear thinkers with excellent communication skills. In popular parlance they're unicorns -- magical creatures that don't exist.

Research firm McKinsey has predicted that by 2018, the U.S. alone may face a 50 percent to 60 percent gap between supply and demand of deep analytic talent.

Bob Rogers, chief data scientist, Big Data Solutions, Intel, might just fit the unicorn bill. Rogers, who holds a PhD in Physics from Harvard University, got his start studying supermassive black holes. He co-wrote a book on time series forecasting using artificial neural networks, which led him to co-found a quantitative futures hedge fund that leveraged large amounts of historical and streaming tick-by-tick data from markets. He's also helped a medical technology firm revolutionize glaucoma diagnostics and co-founded another business to help the healthcare industry extract data from electronic health records.

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