[tmarthal]

Well, I would posit that the majority of data science positions are in advertising and marketing optimization. I would believe that 'global food security' may be more important than social media analysis, as the original posted speculated.

Not to belittle the meaningful point, but becoming a "data scientist" at a startup or large corporation that makes their money by advertising is analogous to becoming a 'quant' on wall-street in the 80's. You have to be in it to make money, rather than caring about the types of data the developed algorithms are applied on.

[dev1n]

I mean, developing a new algorithm for data analysis could be just as important to the OP as analyzing bio data to forecast some sort of disease is to someone else.

[rogerchucker]

Actually advertising and marketing optimization is a very critical problem that hasn't been completely solved yet, especially when privacy concerns are taken into consideration. It is critical towards keeping the Web free and create a more inter-connected economy. While this will obviously have the side-effects of "frivolous" analytics, there is indeed a dearth of enough hybrid practitioners-researchers in data science today. It will probably saturate in 5-10 years but I'm no analyst to predict that.