Communications of the ACM
New Hiring Formula Values Math Pros
Silicon Valley technology firms are seeking employees with stronger backgrounds in statistics and machine learning, thanks to the advent of cloud computing. "When you build for the Web, you have quicker real-time access about how people are using the product," notes Facebook's Mike Schroepfer. "You have to use the data in the proper way."
Employers say the most sought-after candidates can have a diversity of experience and educational backgrounds, with companies preferring a concentration on data-mining techniques over specific degrees.
Local universities are attempting to boost the number of graduates with quantitative backgrounds, with Stanford University requiring computer science undergraduates to take a specialized probability course. Facebook, meanwhile, developed a boot camp program for all new engineers that included a probability and statistics training module. In addition, the company has been recruiting more people for its data science group, a team of Ph.D.s that can extract patterns out of sample sets of terabytes of data.
From The Wall Street Journal
View Full Article
Abstracts Copyright © 2010 Information Inc., Bethesda, Maryland, USA 
No entries found