What to expect:
 

• A hitchhiker's guide to the history of AI: A non-technical journey through the highs and lows of AI’s impact on the world today. (William Browne, co-Founder, Emrys Health)
• From Inputs to Impact: Why Understanding AI Shapes Fair Hiring: HR and recruitment teams increasingly rely on AI, yet with many CVs never being seen by humans it is important to understand how the data in CVs influences the outcomes. What questions do everyone involved in the hiring process need to ask so they can interpret AI outcomes critically to ensure a fair and balanced set of hiring decision? (Parwez Diloo, Data Scientist, Bays Consulting)
• Graphical modelling for decision-making in criminal cases: Criminal cases can be incredibly complex, featuring multiple possible explanations of what might have happened and often conflicting pieces of interrelated evidence and testimony that need to be interwoven into these explanations. Disentangling the explanations and evidence to come to a coherent and rational decision is challenging even for those experienced in probabilistic reasoning, and yet we expect judges and juries to do this analysis essentially in real-time. Miscarriages of justice, like the Sally Clark case in which a woman was convicted of murdering her two children based on misinterpreted statistical evidence, are a stark warning of what can go wrong when there are failures in reasoning. In this talk I will present some new approaches for improving probabilistic reasoning in criminal trials and describe how they might have been used in previous cases.  (Dr Amy Wilson, Lecturer, University of Edinburgh)

The speakers will offer fresh insights on how far we can trust AI to make decisions that impact our lives and shed light on the mysterious ‘black boxes’ influencing our daily decisions. The session will explore how AI and statistics are transforming the world around us—and why understanding them matters more than ever.
Whether you're curious, cautious, or captivated by AI, this event will leave you better informed—and hopefully inspired—about the role of statistics and AI in our future.



 

Sophie Carr is Vice President for Education and Statistical Literacy at the Royal Statistical Society. She is founder and chief executive of Bays Consulting, a company that specialises in data science and statistical analysis. Sophie has a background as an aeronautical engineer. She enjoys taking part in STEM outreach through activities such as writing and delivering Royal Institution Masterclasses on a range of statistics topics to help enthuse and engage the next generation in developing a love of data and statistics.



Parwez Diloo is a Data Scientist at Bays Consulting Ltd, leading the delivery of their data-driven solutions to business and real-world problems across different industries. His focus is on developing real-life simulations and validation strategies for complex modelling. Parwez is a pure Mathematics graduate, an accredited researcher by the ONS, a member of the Institute of Maths and its Applications and the Royal Statistical Society, and is an advisory board member for the Academy for the Mathematical Sciences. He was also named the Future Talent of the Year by Surrey Business Awards, 2024.



Dr Amy Wilson is a lecturer in industrial mathematics at the University of Edinburgh and also the Chair of the Royal Statistical Society Statistics and the Law Section. She is interested in how to make good decisions under uncertainty and the application of cutting edge statistical research to real-world problems. She has worked across a wide range of application areas, for example forensic science, law, energy systems and flood modelling.



Will Browne, co-Founder, Emrys Health, RSS Data Science & AI section, AI task force, 14 years experience at machine learning start up and consultancies as a data scientist, tech lead, product manager and CTO

Free to attend.