The First Latin America Data Science Workshop (LADaS 2018) is in conjunction with the
Dealing with the data deluge produced nowadays in different areas, ranging from basic sciences to billions of users of Global Internet services, emerges as one of the major challenges of our digital society. Presented as a multifaceted vector, this phenomenon has motivated several research initiatives. In science, Big Data has created new opportunities for investigation, motivating scientists, such as biologists, astronomers, biochemists, and researchers from other scientific areas, to face computational problems within the so-called “fourth paradigm” (data-intensive science). In industry, Big Data impacts the way predictive analysis/data analytics is conducted using powerful resources (clusters, clouds) while providing scalability and fault-tolerance. In the governance, there are opportunities to look into massive public databases to generate efficient planning as well as new services that may improve public services offered to citizens. In this context, the major challenge is to provide general methods for extracting relevant knowledge at big data scale. Data Science incorporates scientific methods, processes, and algorithms to extract knowledge from data in various forms. It builds upon techniques and theories from many fields in engineering and basic sciences. It is thus closely related to many traditional well-established disciplines but opens perspectives for a new highly-interdisciplinary area.