On Friday 18 September 2020, the RSS North Eastern local group hosted its first virtual meeting, via Zoom, on Statistics at the National Innovation Centre for Data.
The speaker was Dr Jonathan Law, who works at the National Innovation Centre for Data (NICD) as a data scientist, and the talk was well attended, with 35 people Zooming in.
Jonathan gave an introduction to the NICD and the work of data scientists within the organisation. He then talked through the typical life cycle of data science projects, emphasising that data wrangling takes up the majority of the time in most projects with industry. The different stages of the life cycle were illustrated with an engaging example on classifying the species of penguins, which allowed Jonathan an opportunity to show some very cute penguin photos. Jonathan included details of useful software and packages to conduct the analyses he described at each stage.
The talk was very well received and there was a lively discussion afterwards, with audience members from both academia and industry interested both in how to get more involved in data science and in making connections with the NICD.