Nation’s first data chief: Focus on the people

CEDAR RAPIDS — Data has the power to heal, unite and inspire — or destroy, divide and devastate — and which of those outcomes materializes depends on the people using it and their understanding of the people it represents, according to former and first-ever U.S. Chief Data Scientist DJ Patil.

“The most important thing about data is not the data. It’s that the data points have names,” Patil told a crowd Thursday evening at Coe College’s Sinclair Auditorium for its annual Contemporary Issues Forum — which over the years has welcomed dignitaries like former President George H.W. Bush, former Poland President Lech Walesa and celebrated author Sir Salman Rushdie.

By sharing the story of a woman who wrote to President Barack Obama about her Stage 4 cancer while Patil was chief data scientist from 2015 to 2017 — and how she and others have inspired innovative data use in medical research and beyond — he exemplified the importance of focusing on humans behind the numbers.

“If you don’t understand them, it doesn’t matter how many technical skills you have,” he said. “You have to be able to connect to those people to be able to understand how to solve their problems with data. The data points have names.”

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Patil’s data debut

Data scientists do, too — dating back generations, before the job title existed, like when women who served as human computers helped break German codes during World War II. More recently — in an effort to expand data’s relevance and use it to connect dots that couldn’t be seen before — an evolving crop of data scientists has found new ways to compute data, store it, distribute it and use it.

“We couldn't just have the traditional big supercomputers,” Patil said. “We needed a distributed system. We needed the cloud. We needed storage … the ability to store all this large data, to put it together, to be able to access it. We also needed a vibrant ecosystem. And, most of all, we needed a new kind of talent.”

Patil is among that talent — considered among the most influential data scientists in the world. He got his start at De Anza College, a community college in California, where he realized, “I was pretty good at math.”

First, though, “I was kicked out of my high school algebra class,” Patil told The Gazette. He discovered his affinity for math only after following his girlfriend into a calculus class.

“It was a great fork in the road,” he said. “Which kind of person would I be? Would I just kind of try to skirt by this class, or do I try to learn it? So I checked out all the math books I could from our local library, self-taught myself to catch up, and then I never looked back. I ended up with a doctorate in mathematics.”

That doctorate came from the University of Maryland, where he remains on faculty with a research focus on non-linear dynamics and chaos theory — helping to launch a major research initiative on numerical weather prediction.

Earlier in his career, Patil served as a science and technology policy fellow for the Department of Defense, where he directed efforts to leverage social network analysis to anticipate emerging threats.

Then he moved to the private sector as a scientist with eBay and chief security officer of LinkedIn. After several other stints, Patil was appointed to be the first-ever U.S. Chief Data Scientist in 2015 — an office charged with unleashing the “power of data for the benefit of the American public.”

“The joke is that if you’re the only one ever, you fail,” Patil told The Gazette, noting, “We have our third U.S. chief data scientist.”

But, he said, what is even more encouraging is that the country not only has a federal data scientist, but data chiefs appearing across numerous departments and at the state and city level in many cases.

“The reason that’s so important in our day and age,” he said, “is because what gets measured gets fixed.”

Pros, cons

Pointing to data’s potential to address traffic fatalities, mental health concerns and veterans health care, for example, Patil said the upside surpasses what many can imagine.

While working in the White House, Patil became a founding board member of the Crisis Text Line, a nonprofit offering free and confidential text-based mental health support that, over a decade, recorded more than 9 million conversations with people in crisis.

Using data analyzed through those anonymous calls, the organization has pinpointed top stressors. With 1 in 3 texters mentioning relationship stress or dysfunction in 2022, “relationships” became the top stressor for the first time that year.

“The world is using data very efficiently to actually get the care to people,” he said.

But Patil has concerns, too, involving social media and artificial intelligence.

“Here's what I think we now can concretely say: we know people are harmed and hurt,” he said. “People come away with body issues. People come away hurt by the posts that people make on these platforms. We've seen predatory behavior, specifically around children and young girls in particular, on social media platforms.”

Artificial intelligence also is a two-sided coin, threatening to spread misinformation or promising to amplify the world’s ability to address problems like climate change and cancer.

“It literally is both on any given day,” he said. “On one side, I’m seeing so much excitement and optimism to go solve big problems … And then I’m also seeing that people are weaponizing it for their own power structures or gains.”

To end up on the right side of that line, Patil said, thinkers from the highest level down to local community boards need to do more talking and idea sharing — like at Thursday’s forum and across liberal arts institutions, be it Coe or any campus watching enrollment slip in favor of programs preparing students for specific jobs.

“My biggest message, especially to technologists, is to get exposure to the liberal arts,” Patil said, highlighting a disconnect from the humanities among the threats of big data and artificial intelligence.

But when you understand people, you understand the relevance of the data.

“How do you connect to people, not just the data?” Patil asked. “We have to know their names. We have to tell their stories. That's what really helps connect us. That's how we make progress.”

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