News

A new Bloomberg Business article, Help Wanted: Black Belts in Data, highlights the high and still growing global demand for people with strong data-analysis skills. The article picks out Warwick's BSc in Data Science course, along with related new initiatives at MIT, as prime examples of how some top universities are working to help meet the demand.

Warwick's course is described in the article as "the first of its kind". Professor David Firth, director of the Warwick Data Science Institute, explains: "Certainly it's the first undergraduate Data Science course in the UK. But its most distinctive feature among the various new 'analytics' courses is that Warwick's BSc develops specifically mathematical talent, in exciting ways that lead to a huge variety of immediate and long-term possibilities after graduation".

David continues: "Our first Data Science BSc students started in 2014 --- a small group of highly qualified and well motivated students who were admitted even before the course had fully appeared in the University's prospectus. Given all the public signals about demand for graduates in this area, we're expecting that many more of the best maths-oriented students will choose Data Science in future."

One of the (many) new opportunities generated by the workshop on evidence-based decision support for food security held in the department in April, was an invitation for Dr Martine Barons to join Birmingham Food Council’s food poverty workshop “food insecurity — a city-level response?” held on Monday 11^th May. Although there were half a dozen academics, the vast majority of attendees were drawn from local government and the third sector. All were working in domains which included food and poverty, often directly with individuals and families affected. The purpose of the workshop was to gather the expertise of all on the subject of a city-wide approach to food poverty by identifying the current drivers, possible future drivers, what can be learned from other places, future possibilities and strategies to realise the potential. As part of the evening, Martine was one of the participants interviewed; video here: http://www.birminghamfoodcouncil.org/martine-barons-on-taking-steps-rather-than-swallowing-foodpoverty-whole/

Martine said, “The importance of engaging with opportunities like these is to learn from and engage with those who may facilitate future research opportunities and make use of the outputs of the current project.”

A report just published by the Royal Statistical Society looks at the methods used (by newspapers and others) to construct league tables of universities and their departments, based on the results of the UK Research Excellence Framework (REF 2014).

The report's authors include David Firth (Warwick), as part of an RSS working group with Paul Fearnhead (Lancaster University) and Jon Forster (University of Southampton).

A conclusion of the report is that ideally a "quality per researcher" measure should be used for such tables, with all REF-eligible researchers counted and with "quality" being more closely connected to the HEFCE funding formula --- i.e., more closely than the commonly used GPA (grade point average) scoring of quality levels.

The RSS working group's report also makes some related suggestions for the funding councils themselves, about REF submission rules and reporting; these include elimination of the distorting “threshold” effect of REF 2014's formula for the number of Impact Case Studies in each submission.

The report is available via http://www.rss.org.uk/press, or as a direct download at http://www.rss.org.uk/ref .

The exit-poll design and analysis methods developed by David Firth (with political scientist John Curtice from the University of Strathclyde) were used again at this week's General Election by all of the major UK broadcasters.

At 10pm on election day the on-air seats prediction (simultaneously on BBC, ITV and Sky) based on the exit poll was: Con 316, Lab 239, SNP 58, LD 10, others 27. The actual result of the election was Con 331, Lab 232, SNP 56, LD 8, others 23.

The 2015 exit-poll prediction was thus not "spot on" as it had been in 2005 and 2010. Many commentators had warned beforehand that the 2015 election would be an especially difficult one to predict. The exit-poll prediction was startlingly different from what had been indicated by commercial pre-election voting-intention polls. (e.g., see The Observer on 10 May, After the exit poll, a tsunami raged across the political map) The exit poll strongly indicated the Conservatives as largest party, and the ultimate outcome of a small Conservative majority was clearly not ruled out. This was in stark contrast to predictions from pre-election polls, which had consistently shown Conservative and Labour neck-and-neck with neither party close to an overall majority.

There were some notable public quotes, most prominent of which came from the former Liberal Democrat leader Lord Ashdown, who was interviewed soon after 10pm on the BBC:

If this exit poll is right, I will publicly eat my hat on your programme.

(He was referring to the predicted collapse of the Liberal Democrats to just 10 parliamentary seats. In the event, it turned out even worse than that for the Liberal Democrats, who won just 8 seats. Lord Ashdown failed to keep his hat-eating promise, though!)

For more information on the methods and their performance at previous UK general elections, see Exit Polling Explained.

With effect from April 1st 2015, Saul Jacka has handed over to David Firth as Director of the Warwick Data Science Institute (WDSI). We wish David all the best in leading WDSI into the future (which is very promising indeed for Data Science) and thank Saul very much for his hard work as WDSI’s initial Director.