Data literacy, the ability to derive meaningful information from data, is increasingly being recognized as a vital skillset for everyone in today’s data-rich world. Data analysis has always been the cornerstone of empirical science; today, data analysis has become at the very least useful but in many cases critical for many aspects of scholarly work. Data pours continuously in from the growing number of new devices that we are all using, social media, weather stations, environmental sensors, government agencies, credit card purchases, and browser logs. Most artifacts of our cultural activities today, including television, books, visual art, movies, and music, are born digital. Our ability to make sense of all this data, to decide on its authenticity and provenance, and to extract evidence that can drive decisions is a key skill for future professionals in most fields.  

Many academic institutions, recognizing this phenomenon, are establishing academic credentials and programs for data science, both at the graduate and undergraduate levels. In Western Canada, UCalgary is launching a graduate program - https://science.ucalgary.ca/data-science, and SFU has an undergraduate program - http://www.sfu.ca/students/calendar/2020/fall/programs/data-science/major/bachelor-of-science.html

The UoA’s strength in Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence is well established as evidenced by international rankings, the support of the Pan-Canadian Strategy for AI to Amii, and the Administration’s support through the establishment of the AI4Society signature area. This makes the development of a data-science program perfectly timed, even long overdue. The proposed interdisciplinary embedded certificate is motivated by the intuition that we must tap into this expertise to gift our students today with the capacity to extract insights and knowledge from the data they will undoubtedly deal with in their profession in the future.