In this podcast, Henry Eckerson and Stephen Smith discuss the movement to operationalize data science. Smith is a well-respected expert in the fields of data science, predictive analytics and their application in the education, pharmaceutical, healthcare, telecom and finance industries. He co-founded and served as CEO of G7 Research LLC and the Optas Corporation which provided the leading CRM / Marketing Automation solution in the pharmaceutical and healthcare industries. Smith has published journal articles in the fields of data mining, machine learning, parallel supercomputing, text understanding, and simulated evolution. He has published two books through McGraw-Hill on big data and analytics and holds several patents in the fields of educational technology, big data analytics, and machine learning. He holds a BS in Electrical Engineering from MIT and an MS in Applied Sciences from Harvard University. He is currently the research director of data science at Eckerson Group.