Q. What does the first chief data scientist do?

A. To me, the government says, “Okay, we have data, but how do we use that responsibly to create efficiencies, to create transparency, to unlock economic potential? How do we get that data to preserve American competitiveness and advance innovation?”

The mission of this role is an amplification of things that have been happening.

Q. How will you achieve those goals?

There are three areas where we have the biggest chance to succeed in our mission.

The first is precision medicine.

We’re at this place where we have much more comprehensive ways of looking at our bodies. How do we take bioinformatics and what we’ve been able to do in data science and bring them together to optimize health care? The open question is: How do we make precision medicine scalable? How do we bring it to the masses?

The next one is open data. We’ve got data.gov [a Web site that features machine-readable government data], which has really changed the game. Think about the billions of dollars that rest on open data infrastructure. People do research on that data, that research turns into insight, that insight turns into wisdom and that wisdom is put back into models and scientific results. The foundation of all this is open data. How do we enhance that across-the-board?

The third area is tech talent. How do we increasingly bring in and train the necessary talent to prepare our government to capi­tal­ize on open data

confuzzled dude wrote:

Q. What does the first chief data scientist do?

A. To me, the government says, “Okay, we have data, but how do we use that responsibly to create efficiencies, to create transparency, to unlock economic potential? How do we get that data to preserve American competitiveness and advance innovation?”

The mission of this role is an amplification of things that have been happening.

Q. How will you achieve those goals?

There are three areas where we have the biggest chance to succeed in our mission.

The first is precision medicine.

We’re at this place where we have much more comprehensive ways of looking at our bodies. How do we take bioinformatics and what we’ve been able to do in data science and bring them together to optimize health care? The open question is: How do we make precision medicine scalable? How do we bring it to the masses?

The next one is open data. We’ve got data.gov [a Web site that features machine-readable government data], which has really changed the game. Think about the billions of dollars that rest on open data infrastructure. People do research on that data, that research turns into insight, that insight turns into wisdom and that wisdom is put back into models and scientific results. The foundation of all this is open data. How do we enhance that across-the-board?

The third area is tech talent. How do we increasingly bring in and train the necessary talent to prepare our government to capi­tal­ize on open data

http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/on-it/the-white-houses-first-chief-data-scientist-is-no-stranger-to-washington/2015/03/27/e9aa8c30-cd7d-11e4-a2a7-9517a3a70506_story.html?tid=hpModule_79c38dfc-8691-11e2-9d71-f0feafdd1394&hpid=z18