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It's January of a new year! It's the time for new year's resolutions and fresh resolve to achieve those goals that remained elusive at the end of last year. Achieving a challenging objective often requires taking a new perspective. Since my new year's resolution is to blog more, I wanted to start out the year with a blog about 12 key areas where we've seen first-hand, working with organizations around the globe, the impact that taking a new perspective can have.

A well-known saying, probably misattributed to Einstein, says that "insanity is doing the same thing over and over again but expecting different results." If there's an objective you had trouble achieving last year, maybe this year you need to come at it from a new perspective.

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.

Some problems are complicated. Finding a solution requires expertise and analysis, but the solution exists. Sky scrapers are complicated. Some problems are complex or even wicked. These problems have no solution. They’re too big, too slippery, too thorny.

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.

In Stanley Kubrick’s famous film based on Arthur C. Clark’s book, 2001: A Space Odyssey, a mysterious black monolith appears on Earth millions of years before modern humans. It’s the classic “black box.” We don’t know who made it, what’s in it, or how it works, but it’s miraculous and powerful and somehow results in jumpstarting the entire evolution of humankind.

I am constantly amazed by the energy and momentum around data science. Only a few years ago, I would be met with a blank stare when I told someone I planned on going to grad school for machine learning. Today, there is no need for my “it's like computer science, linear algebra, and statistics had a combined love child” analogy as most people instantly respond with “Oh, like AI!”

Have you ever read the book Travels with Charley by John Steinbeck? The first part of the book is John Steinbeck talking about his lifelong affliction with wanderlust. I spent a few years living out of a VW camper van, indulging my own wanderlust affliction, so the book quickly claimed a special place in my heart. Steinbeck is such a skilled writer, and he describes the feeling -

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.)