The spiral of normalcy: on communicating in the data sciences

Friday October 5, 2pm, Carslaw 173

Steph de Silva
Rex Analytics and PricewaterhouseCoopers

The spiral of normalcy: on communicating in the data sciences

Communicating technical concepts around data science and statistics is a difficult, under rated but entirely essential skill to applied work in industry and beyond. Steph will talk about some of the reasons why we, as statisticians, mathematicians, data scientists and the like find ourselves in this position, what we might do about it and why it matters.

Steph has a Ph.D. in theoretical econometrics. Her first job after leaving academia was with the World Bank, working on survey data from the developing world. Real data came as a tremendous shock after years of simulating her own. She recovered eventually and went on to live a full and varied life.

These days, Steph is a data scientist working for a major consulting house where she’s living the generalist’s dream. She has no idea what she’ll be doing next week- and she’s absolutely sure she has no answers to the problems they’re going to throw at her when she gets there. Yet.