Enabling Data Science for the Majority.

Despite great strides in the generation, collection, and processing of data at scale, data science is still extremely inconvenient for the vast majority of the population. The driving goal of our research, over the past half decade, has been to make it easy for individuals and teams---regardless of programming or analysis expertise---manage, analyze, make sense of, and draw insights from large datasets. In this article, we reflect on a comprehensive suite of tools that we've been building to empower everyone to perform data science more efficiently and effortlessly, including DataSpread, a scalable spreadsheet tool that combines the benefits of spreadsheets and databases, and ZenVisage, a visual exploration tool that accelerates the discovery of trends or patterns. Our tools have been developed in collaboration with experts in various disciplines, including neuroscience, battery science, genomics, astrophysics, and ad analytics. We will discuss some of the key technical challenges underlying the development of these tools, and how we addressed them, drawing from ideas in multiple disciplines. in the process, we will outline a research agenda for tool development to empower everyone to tap into the hidden potential in their datasets at scale.