Data Fest Data Summit 2018 – Day Two LiveBlog

Today I am back at the Data Fest Data Summit 2018, for the second day. I'm here with my EDINA colleagues James Reid and Adam Rusbridge and we are keen to meet people interested in working with us, so do say hello if you are here too! I'm liveblogging the presentations so do keep an eye here for my notes, updated throughout the event. As usual these are genuinely live notes, so please let me know if you have any questions, comments, updates, additions or corrections and I'll update them accordingly. We've just opened with a video on Ecometrica and their Data Lab supported work on calculating water footprints. I'd like to start by thanking our sponsors, who make this possible. And also I wanted to ask you about your highlights from yesterday. These include Eddie Copeland from Nesta's talk, discussion of small data, etc. Data science has a huge impact for the business world, but also for societal good. I wanted to talk about the 5 i's of data science for social good: So, the number one, is the Interest. The data can attrat people to engage with a problem. Everything we do is digital now. And all this information is useful for something. No matter what your passion, you can follow this as a data scientist. I wanted to give an example here… My background is astrophysics and I love teaching people about the world, but my day job has always been other things. About 20 years ago I was working in data science at NASA and we saw an astronomical – and I mean it, we were NASA – growth in data. And we weren't sure what to do with it, and a colleague told me about data mining. It seemed interesting but I just wasn't getting what the deal was. We had a lunch talk from a professor at Stanford, and she came in and filled the board with equations… She was talking about the work they were doing at IBM in New York. And then she said "and now I'm going to tell you about our summer school" – where they take kids from inner city kids who aren't interested in school, and teach them data science. Deafening silence from the audience… And she said "yes, we teach the staff data mining in the context of what means most for these students, what matters most. And she explained: street basketball. So IBM was working on a software called IBM Advanced Calc specifically predicting basketball strategy. And the kids loved basketball enough that they really wanted to work in math and science… And I loved that, but what she said next changed my life. My PhD research was on colliding galaxy. It was so exciting… I loved teaching and I was so impressed with what she had done.