The core concept of "Anchors and Encores" is about balancing foundational, unchanging principles with the ongoing application, reinforcement and revisiting of those principles in the latest technologies.

Anchors represent the fundamental ideas, concepts, or principles that serve as the stable, reliable foundation of a field or discipline. These are the core ideas that remain relevant over time, offering stability and context regardless of advancements or changes in technology.

Encores refer to the repeated efforts of technology to solve the same challenges, often driven by new tools or methods, nevertheless facing some variation of age old problems leading to cycles of innovation around underlying unchanging needs.

Together, anchors provide a stable foundation, while encores highlight the repetitive nature of technological progress and the ongoing attempts to address long-standing problems.

Who needs this?

1. The general reader who wants to look beyond the abstraction that has been carefully created around every single major computing technology of the past half decade. Google simplified web search by distilling complex link relationships into a single text box, just as decades later, ChatGPT would do the same for human language by leveraging massive computational power to predict the most likely next words based on vast textual data. But how does it all come about? If you have ever seriously asked that question, then this book is for you. It also probably means that you may be considering a move into the field of data science. This will serve as a solid introduction to key elements of the technologies associated with managing and handling data in organizations today.
2. The newly minted data practitioner who migrated into the field of data science and never developed a foundational understanding of computer science principles. Written by an electrical and computer engineer who has been on a sojourn in the world of business data, this work presents some foundational concepts that I brought with me, along with relevant history that have helped me navigate my work insightfully. I am confident they will help you too.
3. The experienced data scientist who sometimes feels overwhelmed by the neverending changes in the field of data science and would like to gain a timeless perspective about the core building blocks of the technologies they must wrestle with constantly in creating value from organizational data assets.
4. The disrupting futurist who wants to rethink the fundamentals of modern computing for any possible number of reasons. For instance, to create replacements and alternatives to existing systems that are freed from some of the corporate and geographical legacies of modern computing. This is the afro-futurist in me speaking.

How was this book developed?

The foundational ideas of the content for this book were developed while preparing to teach a class on Big Data and Data Science to Masters of Business Analytics students at the University of Utah. After taking a look at the existing curriculum for the course from previous semesters, and being told that many of the students who took the class did not always have a technical background, I had two major questions. What are the things that I would like students to know about computing and big data BEFORE being told how to wrangle data using the pydata stack and other software packages. I wrote down a few of those things and captioned them ‘Big Ideas’ and allocated one to each week throughout the semester. Preparing to talk about each of these topics in detail sparked a deeper interest in thinking broadly about how certain fundamental ideas about computing technology remained unchanging even in the light of multiple new and improved approaches that had been developed, as embedded in new technologies. My second question pertained to the reality that the field of data science is such a rapidly changing and evolving field. What are the things that are less likely to change about the problems being solved by big data technology EVEN AS frameworks, packages, tools constantly change and get replaced. The combination of these two questions led me to the idea of ‘anchors’ and ‘encores’. In a world where every single domain is constantly faced by rapid changes, many times due to some influence of technology, anchors and encores represents my offer of conceptual sanctuary, from which the reader can build clarity about the field of big data and related technologies.

About the Author

Acknowledgements

Dedication

This book is dedicated to my mom, Comfort Agogo, who is battling cancer at the time I am writing this message. Feb, 20, 2025.