Who am I?

• Keynote, Speaker and Teacher at conferences throughout Europe
• Industry work and 'big data' blogger  for several years
• Co-organizer of Data Science Meetup in Luxembourg 

Who do I work for?

So how come I care about data?


Well I always loved science.
I wanted to be a neuroscientist

Then I fell in love with Mathematics

I studied Quantum Mechanics at Bristol and Mathematics in Luxembourg

This gets a bit complicated...

And my cat was never much use...

Along the way I learned some programming and other skills...

I needed to find a career

And I decided Academia wasn't for me.

So I became a data scientist!

• Explain the substance behind the phrase 'big data'
  
  
  
  
• Tell you how you can use data in your business.
  
  
  
  
• Help you understand the importance of data in your business strategy.
  

What is a data scientist?

Why am I talking about this?

What is the competitive advantage?

• Massively personalised online experiences
• 'Data moats' are hard to copy

 

Amazon: Supply chain and warehouse models

Selecting 'House of Cards'

Source: Netflix

HR Analytics

So, who is talking about Big Data?

"We project a need for 1.5 million additional managers and analysts in the United States who can ask the right questions and consume the results of the analysis of Big Data effectively." -  Big data: The next frontier for innovation, competition, and productivity, McKinsey report

Who else?

Gartner says 'Data is the new oil'

But talk is cheap...

Big data is like teenage sex: everyone talks about it, nobody really knows how to do it, everyone thinks everyone else is doing it, so everyone claims they are doing it... -

Professor Dan Ariely - Duke University

 Example: Linkedin

But I work in the real world not online!

UPS uses data from the Internet of Things to travel more efficiently and save millions on fuel consumption.

So what other areas?

How do you recommend books?

Use Machine Learning!

Preventative Maintenance for Windmills

Siemens are leveraging IoT data

• 'Source: English Wikipedia, original upload 15 July 2004 by Leonard G. - Creative Commons Sharealike license
  

Web Crawling and Scraping

Zalando the German fashion e-commerce company  are scraping millions of websites to find trends.

Audio and visual data

Spotify uses sound data in their recommendations!

Social media data

Fashion - Image Analysis

Recruitment data

What about Metadata?

Healthcare data

Genomics and health data are too.

Even in Food...

I hope you can see that there is...

• Getting data is hard
  
  
  
• Building models is hard
  
  
  
• Asking the right business questions is even harder

I often have to borrow lots of peoples brains to get to
the right business questions...

 Pick the right methodology for the job

• Text -> topic modelling, sentiment analysis, information extraction
• E-commerce data -> prospensity analysis, collaborative filtering
  
• Multimedia -> speech-to-text, audio fingerprinting, face recognition
  
• Clickstream logs -> frequent pattern mining, sequence analysis
• Yield optimisation -> Optimisation models, weather forecasting
• Proton-proton collision from LHC -> I have no idea despite having a Physics degree
  

What is a data product?

Here is an Example from Mailchimp:
When should I send that email?

And produce a magic button :)

Case Study - Marketing Analytics: In the Game Industry

Example

Here is a graph of active users on an online game. Marketing teams use tools like this to monitor their customers in real-time

Example:Supply Chain Management

• These are examples from Tableau an excellent data science product - based on laptop sized data sets. Similar to my Amazon work.  However these can also be built with open source tools.

Electricity Demand prediction

Analysing IoT data for demand prediction

So you can do an experiment

User Conversion after a website change.

.

Example: Financial Analysis

Quantopian Inc

Example: Moving average of AAPL

Risk is also data science challenge

Data can be used for NGO's

This is a web app of house prices and commutes, done for an NGO in London who wanted to show the effects of
changes in house prices on peoples commutes.

Politics: Hilary Clinton

So why would I need a data scientist?

You may already have one. I know numerous business intelligence, data analysts, business analysts, risk analysts who ARE data scientists.

Alternatively you can hire a data analytics consultant to help you get started.

But what signals should I look for?

Well there are many answers... Like...

Does this sound like you?

• Are you losing customers and not understanding why?

• Are you making decisions on the basis of data or on the basis of 'gut feeling'?

• Are you changing your websites or products on the basis of data driven experimentation?
  

If you want Interviews with experts

Thank You For Listening