For a field supposedly starved of talent, data science seems to have been minting a lot of new experts in a hurry. The depth of interest was on display this week in San Francisco, where 1,600 people turned up for a data science summit organised by Turi, a company run by University of Washington machine learning professor Carlos Guestrin.

Mr Guestrin argues that all software applications will need inbuilt intelligence within five years, making data scientists — people trained to analyse large bodies of information — key workers in this emerging “cognitive” tech economy.

Whether or not he is right about the coming ubiquity, there is already a core of critical applications that depend on machine learning, led by recommendation programmes, fraud detection systems, forecasting tools and applications for predicting customer behaviour.