On the Nature of Data Science

One can hear "Data Science" defined as a synonym for machine learning or as a branch of Statistics. I shall argue that it is far more than that; it is the natural evolution of the technology of very large-scale data management to solve problems in scientific and commercial fields. To support my argument, I shall give a brief introduction to two algorithms that are important in data science but that are neither machine learning nor statistics: locality-sensitive hashing and counting distinct elements.