What Is Data?

What is data?

Data is another word for facts and information.

The number of children in your class is data. The colour of your bike is data. A photo of your dog is data. A song is data too.

Anything we can record and store can be data. Computers love data because they can hold lots of it and use it very fast.

Many kinds of data

Data comes in different forms:

• Numbers: your age, the score in a game, the temperature.
• Words: a message, a name, a story.
• Pictures: photos and drawings.
• Sounds: music and voices.

Inside a computer, all of this is stored as numbers, even pictures and sounds. (Remember how pictures become pixel numbers in How Computers See Pictures?)

What can computers do with data?

Once a computer has data, it can:

• Count it: how many photos do I have?
• Sort it: put the newest emails first.
• Search it: find every beach photo.
• Spot patterns in it.

Computers do these jobs much faster than people, especially with huge amounts of data.

Why AI needs data

Here is the big link. AI learns from data.

To teach an AI to spot cats, we give it lots of cat photos. To teach it to understand speech, we give it lots of voice recordings. The data is the AI's set of examples, just like in Teaching a Computer to Sort.

This means the data must be good. If the data is messy, wrong, or unfair, the AI learns the wrong things. Good data in, good results out. Bad data in, bad results out.

Keeping data private

Some data is personal. Your full name, your home address, your photos, and where you go are personal data.

We should keep personal data private and safe. That means:

• Do not share personal data with strangers or apps you do not trust.
• Ask a trusted grown-up before giving any data online.
• Use settings to control what is saved.

You can read more about staying safe in Using AI Safely and Responsibly.

Data and code

People use code to collect, store, and clean data. If you want to work with data one day, a great start is Coding.