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Love Data Week - Student Blog

People fall in love if someone or something helps them and makes them feel happy. This can be family, a friend, a pet, a hobby, and even technology.

Modern society has fallen in love with data because of astonishing things they can do. People have become fascinated by the convenience that data bring.


Data are used as a vital element to develop the technologies that we demand. The recommended movies and videos for you in Netflix and YouTube are the results of algorithms trained on tons of relevant data. ChatGPT, a language model that became sensationally popular recently due to its surprising performance, has also been trained on over 8 million web pages and 300 billion words of data. These advanced technologies are enough to impress people and companies. Accordingly, the belief that data would change the world or decide a company’s life and death at least has been strengthened recent years. 

Even aside from the cutting-edge technologies, data affect small decisions of our lives. Let’s imagine that you plan to give a nice gift to your partner for Valentine's day. The first thing you might do is browse an online or offline store to find something good. The item emerging on the top page of the website or placed on the entrance shelves catches your eyes, so you might buy it. This decision is a consequence of marketing strategies that carefully select and position the products based on the collected data. 

Almost everything, from shopping to developing AI technologies, is decided by data. Data have brought a new logic and decision method to companies, and a new way to behave and present to the public. We are the real-time observers of data innovation. Some people feel positive, and some people feel pessimistic about the changes caused by data. One thing is for sure: resisting convenience stemming from data is not easy. We've become so accustomed to being surrounded by data that we cannot live without these anymore, like we cannot live without our close families, friends, and pets. If this is not love, then what other word can describe it?

Youngmin Jin

MSc Data Science student


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