Data Futurology - Leadership And Strategy in Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Data Science

Kate Carruthers, Chief Data & Insights Officer at the University of New South Wales joins us for an episode that discusses the results of a survey shared by She Loves Data across their community regarding women's expectations about their careers, given the challenges of the past year. To start us off, Kate shares how her change-ready attitude has allowed her to seize new opportunities and learn new things. Though it might be intimidating, she encourages others to step up and say ‘yes’ to challenges. The pandemic of 2020 changed the nature of work forever, affecting millions of careers. Sadly, more women were hit harder. For this reason, She Loves Data reached out to their community and asked professional women about their worries, challenges and aspirations regarding work. Her advice for women listening is to find a community of people like them and groups that support them. Surrounding yourself with others may provide helpful and valuable perspectives that you might have not yet considered. Quotes: "I got my start in IT by being in the kitchen of the National Trust and making a comment about the network to the executive director and she said, you seem like you know what you’re doing, you should be in charge, and I said, sure." "I say yes a lot. When new opportunities come up I have a tendency to say yes because I’m very change-ready. I’m at the front-end of that change curve, I’m not one of the people at the back end of the change curve. I think that’s so important because it gives you the opportunity to try, and you might fail but you might not. I’ve succeeded more than I’ve failed, on average." "Getting everybody together because in the modern world it's much more complex and no one person has the solution to the problems. It needs to be a collaborative effort and if you don't bring people together you don’t get the best solutions. You don’t get that diversity of thinking from the different perspectives, and that brings better and richer solutions." "I was suddenly responsible for all computer systems in the organization and I had no idea of what I was doing, but I got up to speed and I really had an amazing opportunity and I took it." Thanks to our sponsors: Shine Solutions Group Talent Insights SAS Women in Analytics (WIA) Network Growing Data Read the full episode summary here: #SheLeads Ep 10 Enjoy the tenth episode of our #SheLeads Series! --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/datafuturology/message

We are joined by Celine Le Cotonnec, Chief Data & Innovation Officer at Bank of Singapore and Shameek Kundu, Chief Data Officer at Standard Chartered Bank. They share with us their perspective on what the function and goal of the Chief Data Officer is. From Shameek’s experience, the function of the Chief Data Officer role varies by industry, maturity of the organization with respect to data and sometimes even by geographic location. Celine refers to a study that shows a successful data transformation is 20% about tech, 50% about the people’s mindset and 30% process reengineering wherever you are implementing some type of data product. For her, one key aspect of the CDO role is how you manage the people to achieve transformation within the organization. Quotes: "Many banks that have built some kind of credit model, even with traditional analytics, have seen their models crumble with Covid-19." "In any successful data transformation; 20% is about the tech, 50% is about people and their mindset and 30% is about process change." "If you want to detect financial crime, absolutely the holy grail of AI, in order to detect something like financial crime, at least in supervised learning, you need to know that a transaction was financial crime. But all we can do is detect potential financial crime, then we go and report it to a regulator and we never hear back." Thanks to our sponsors: Shine Solutions Group Talent Insights SAS Women in Analytics (WIA) Network Growing Data Read the full episode summary here: #SheLeads Ep 9 Enjoy the ninth episode of our #SheLeads Series! --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/datafuturology/message

In this episode we have Figen Ulgen, Head of Data & Analytics at Woolworths NZ and Angela Kim, Head of Analytics & AI at Teachers Health joining us for a conversation around soft skills and their relevance in the world of data. Figen gives soft skills the same importance as technical skills, given that both of them are necessary for individuals to reach success. Soft skills may come naturally for some people, but even those who struggle can learn them. It may not come automatically, but it is definitely possible to improve. Angela encourages organizations to provide training for their teams in this area, to help them understand each other and their differences better, and also to learn from each other. Quotes: "If you don't have the communication skills or the ability to try and see things from their perspective, I think it is pretty difficult to get to the actual analytics part." "We need to be able to socially well coordinate relationships because it is adding another dimension to the workplace." Thanks to our sponsors: Shine Solutions Group Talent Insights SAS Women in Analytics (WIA) Network Growing Data Read the full episode summary here: #SheLeads Ep 8 Enjoy the eighth episode of our #SheLeads Series! --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/datafuturology/message

On our 7th episode we are joined by two very talented women, Siew Choo Soh, Managing Director & Group Head of Consumer Banking and Big Data/AI Technology at DBS Bank and Terisa Roberts, Director and Global Lead: Risk Modelling and Decisioning at SAS. Siew Choo shares with us DBS’s mindset around innovation. For them, the use of technology does not equate to innovation. They don’t have a designated innovation department, just a small innovation team whose job is not to innovate, it’s rather helping other people across the bank to innovate. They provide resources to enable everyone to be able to innovate by empowering the individuals and teams to be curious. Terisa draws attention to a recent study by Deloitte, showing that firms who invest in diversity and innovation are 8 times more likely to achieve their business outcomes. She also mentions that in Risk Management, they monitor the algorithms they’re using in society and how these algorithms can discriminate against certain groups. Whenever they are faced with these challenges, a diverse team is in charge of identifying and remediating these biases. Quotes: "Their job is not to innovate, their job is to help other people across the bank to innovate." "You have to introduce bias to unbias your algorithm, because the algorithm has been trained by biased data." "Because of historical biases that were present in the training data that the algorithms learned from, that was perpetuated. A diverse team would have been able to stop that bias from becoming operational in the way decisions are made within that firm." "To make them understand each other from the different background they have, whether from cultural perspective or job experience perspective, can sometimes be quite a challenge, but I would say that once you manage to go through that initial phase you’ll see that it will help you get the best results, if you have a very diverse group of people." Thanks to our sponsors: Shine Solutions Group Talent Insights SAS Women in Analytics (WIA) Network Growing Data Read the full episode summary here: #SheLeads Ep 7 Enjoy the seventh episode of our #SheLeads Series! --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/datafuturology/message

In this episode we have Vidyarth Eluppai Srivatsan, Director of Marketing Technology at The Coca-Cola Company and Pavel Bulowski, Chief Marketing Officer at Meiro and Co-Founder of She Loves Data. Vidyarth describes the Director of Marketing Technology position as a bridge between the roles of Chief Data Officer, Chief Marketing Officer and Chief Information Officer. It’s about going across the marketing, digital or technology to bridge the knowledge gaps and come up with both the strategy and execution. Data’s importance in marketing has soared. Currently, there are over 8000 AI and automation platforms available for marketers to take advantage of, so it can be tricky to know which ones are worth our attention and money. Pavel emphasizes the importance of thinking of them as strategic purchases and looking for the ones that offer capabilities that will help differentiate ourselves from the competition. Quotes: "Often when I work with people on my team who have that one very linear trajectory in their career, they are good at what they do but they don’t see a bigger picture. That’s what I can bring to the table, synthesize across the board a little bit more." "This role is a bridge between all those roles, CDO, CMO, CIO, that deal with marketing. There is a definite knowledge gap. We can’t expect all of these functions to know everything about how the fundamental layer that connects each of these buckets to really come through, and that to me is the central role of anyone who heads up the domain of marketing technology. So regardless of where this role sits, this particular person has to think about going across the marketing, digital or technology to bridge the gaps and really come up with both the strategy and the execution of the angles. That in essence is what the role entails, the definition of the structure will vary across companies but the purpose is to bridge the knowledge gap between these departments." "It’s a bit of a blindside because you can’t drive businesses by data, I think that’s a bit of a misconception. Business has to be driven by business, you need to have business objectives.In my mind it’s business driven and informed by data, but not data-driven on its own. When people put it out, a bit out of context and into the open it often feels like there are a bunch of data scientists who are able to find these whole new insights and directions for a company, and it is not necessarily so straight forward. Often, data analysts don’t have the business context. I think over the next couple of years it’s going to go back and we are going to hear more of business reasoning in marketing again, supported by data, of course." Thanks to our sponsors: Shine Solutions Group Talent Insights SAS Women in Analytics (WIA) Network Growing Data Read the full episode summary here: #SheLeads Ep 6 Enjoy the sixth episode of our #SheLeads Series! --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/datafuturology/message

With AI determining many system-led decisions, from who gets a job, a loan or business opportunity, the need to ensure diversity and inclusivity in the creation of algorithmic rules becomes more important. In our fifth episode, we have Glenda Crisp, Chief Data Officer at National Australia Bank. She started her career in tech as a programmer in a bank in Canada and then went on to get an MBA. Before being recruited by NAB, she worked at TD Bank in Toronto. As the Chief Data Officer at National Australia Bank, both her business and technological side come together. Diversity is a key topic at NAB. They have 6 pillars of inclusion that they target, which are: Gender Balance, NABility and Neurodiversity, NAB Pride, Cultural Inclusion, African Inclusion and Indigenous. When it comes to bias you have to actively look for it and manage it, given that AI learns from data, historical data is a result of human decisions and humans are biased. NAB has an ethical framework for the use of data, machine learning and AI.  Quotes: "Nothing moves faster than technology [so] pay attention to the big themes that are going on across industries." "We can’t just ask AI to be more fair but we actually need to prescribe math that is fair." "The one thing I always say to young women when I get the chance is ‘please do not become complacent.’" Thanks to our sponsors: Shine Solutions Group Talent Insights SAS Women in Analytics (WIA) Network Growing Data Read the full episode summary here: #SheLeads Ep 5 Enjoy the fifth episode of our #SheLeads Series! --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/datafuturology/message

In this episode, we have Virginia Wheway Vice President of Data & Analytics at Koala and Jan Sheppard, Chief Data Officer at the Tertiary Education Commission in New Zealand. Diversity is a broad area, and it includes gender, age, ethnicity, etc. Fostering diversity in an organization starts with the recruiting and hiring process.To make sure you hire the right people for the job you need to establish what you need or want for that role before you start recruiting, and then take out all your biases that might come into play. Diverse teams need leaders who are brave and ready to get outside their comfort zones, stay tuned to learn their tips on how to foster diversity in your team! Quotes: "In another company I was at before, the machine learning people have been repurposed to design dashboards." "The sorts of people I hire are not so rigid that they will only do one thing." "The real skills that are shining through and that people need are flexibility and adaptability because covid has made us in many ways. We need people who are adaptable and also understand the business." "Especially when appealing to women, it takes a different description. A lot of job descriptions across the board use male language, very direct and definite language. There are a lot of lessons to take out of this, but certainly how we advertise ourselves and how we build our relationships." Thanks to our sponsors: Shine Solutions Group Talent Insights SAS Women in Analytics (WIA) Network Growing Data Read the full episode summary here: #SheLeads Ep 4 Enjoy the fourth episode of our #SheLeads Series! --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/datafuturology/message

When lockdowns started, people around the world, especially women, found themselves juggling with their personal and professional lives. In this episode we have Kathryn Gulifa, Chief Data & Analytics Officer at Worksafe Victoria, and Stuti Sharma, Director of Data Science at Visa who share with us the challenges they faced while trying to cope with the new normal. Stuart Garland, Director at Talent Insights Group gives us the recruiters’ perspective on the covid impact and tells us employees are not the only ones adapting to changes, employers are doing so as well. Some of them are beginning to realise remote work can be productive and perhaps there is an opportunity for some work from home to offer employees flexibility post covid-19. Quotes: "I was trying to balance full time work while caring for a 2 year old and a 6 month old. Which I found, honestly, really challenging and had many ups and downs from the mental health perspective, both trying to understand my place in the world having just returned from work and joining back into an organization that was facing a very different economic situation and different priorities than when I left." "I had my laptop setup on the dining table and it was always there, even over the weekends. I think it was mostly self-inflicted, I would find myself working late in the night and then I realized that it was not sustainable. This thing was not ending anytime soon, and I made a conscious effort to draw a line between my office hours and time with my family." "I have a team member that says it’s not working from home, it’s living at work." Thanks to our sponsors: Shine Solutions Group Talent Insights SAS Women in Analytics (WIA) Network Growing Data Read the full episode summary here: #SheLeads Ep 3 Enjoy the third episode of our #SheLeads Series! --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/datafuturology/message

Anu Madgavkar is a partner at McKinsey Global Institute and she’s done important research on Covid-19’s effect on gender inequality and the future of women at work. Anu talks about the diversity dividend and the compelling statistics supporting it. A study from +1000 companies around the world, found that organizations in the top quartile in terms of diversity in C-suite executives are 25% more likely to outperform in terms of profitability and long-term value creation. This holds true for gender and ethnic diversity. Also, companies in the bottom quartile are 29%  more likely to underperform, resulting in lower profitability or average value creation. Quotes: "I started focusing more on this notion that there’s a really leaky pipeline and a lot of women do dropout, and as you start thinking about that and navigating your own journey through that I think I got a lot more interested in why does this matter to the world at large, to economies and to women around the world." "Looking out 10 years I would say that the pace at which automation is changing the inherent work that we are all doing, that is going to accelerate and that is going to affect all people in the workforce." "Both automation as well as the trend towards more alternative work arrangements will both likely accelerate post-covid." "It’s a period of great innovation and experimentation and I think we really need to embrace this time to be more aggressive and experiment with more gender-friendly ways of support, both on the government policies side as well as the business side." Thanks to our sponsors: Shine Solutions Group Talent Insights SAS Women in Analytics (WIA) Network Growing Data Read the full episode summary here: #SheLeads Ep 2 Enjoy the second episode of our #SheLeads Series! --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/datafuturology/message

Data Futurology podcast host, Felipe Flores interviews She Loves Data co-founders Jana Marlé-Zizková and Pavel Bulowski, who share how they found a philanthropic niche in data literacy while pushing for more diverse and inclusive workforces. What started as a data workshop for a roomful of friends and friends of friends, has grown into a 21k+ community in 14 (and growing) city chapters around the world. Listen to inspiring stories from them and their members. Jana and Pavel both have abundant experience in the analytics field and also co-founded Meiro, a Customer Data Platform that allows organizations to harness user data. Jana was recently recognized as part of Singapore’s 100 Women in Tech. More than just a non-profit, She Loves Data is a community and a movement with the goal of encouraging women across Asia, ANZ, Africa, Europe and the USA to embrace tech and strengthen their data and digital literacy to future-proof their careers. Quotes: "There are only like 25% of women in this field. How about going out there and inspiring women to look at data as a possible future career." "You are changing people’s complete life trajectory by lowering the barriers to entry into something that they can find their passion and interest in." "It’s never late to change your career, it’s never late to learn about tech and data because it can help you for your future career, your jobs and maybe make your life more meaningful." Thanks to our sponsors: Shine Solutions Group Talent Insights SAS Women in Analytics (WIA) Network Growing Data Read the full episode summary here: https://www.sheleads-datafuturology.com/episodes/event-one-bkj8b Enjoy the first episode in our #SheLeads Series! --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/datafuturology/message

Dr. Alex Antic is the Head of Data Science at the Software Innovation Institute. He has 17+ years of experience across different industries including Federal and State government, Insurance, Asset Management, Banking (Investment and Retail), Consulting and Academia. Alex has recently been recognised as one of the Top 10 Analytics Leaders in Australia by IAPA (Institute of Analytics Professionals of Australia). He describes the early days of his career as a time for personal growth and honing in his technical skills. Now, his goal is to use data science and artificial intelligence for public good, and as a way to drive impact and change. Alex is an enthusiast of the experimentation culture; he believes in the fail fast and fail cheap notion and how it is important for organizations to not be scared of failure, given that this can keep them from moving towards innovation. Quotes: "Can’t take out the human element when it comes to analytics. Analytics only gets you so far, you have to think about broader applications." "People need to think about what problem they are solving and if it needs to be solved by a complex method." "When you are trying to solve a problem, start with the simple solution first, and add complexity as you need to, as sometimes the non sexy elements will add value to the organisation, such as automating an excel file .. You don’t often or always need to go down the complex deep learning algorithm to extract value, as it will make it difficult to explain and difficult to validate, and simplistic is beautiful in many ways." Read the full episode summary here: Episode #136 Enjoy the show! --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/datafuturology/message

We have Khalifeh Al Jadda, Director of Data Science at Home Depot. Khalifeh has solid knowledge in large scale machine learning and data mining techniques. He tells us how in retail some businesses are still running manually, without the use of automation tools, so the job of data science leaders is to educate business partners and show them by example and with data the value that data science and artificial intelligence can deliver to their organizations. Later on, he explains their workflow is managed by product managers and starts with the data scientist taking the responsibility of building the machine learning model, training the model, validating it and even going all the way towards testing it. Then, machine learning engineers take over and scale up the code, they clean it, perform unit testing and do everything needed for it to be ready for production. Quotes: "I started my journey in the industry from that point, which was the first internship I got in 2015. That’s the first advice I give to anyone, if you are in graduate school, if you are a student, make sure to pursue an internship before graduation. It’ll make your life much easier after graduation." "It’s been an interesting journey, a great journey. I hope that everyone actually goes through those challenges in their careers, because  it makes you a better and stronger data scientist." "You cannot build a team with only computer vision people, or a team with just statistical people. You need to bring people from different backgrounds. That’s what my organization includes. It includes people from all backgrounds." Read the full episode summary here: Episode #135 Enjoy the show! --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/datafuturology/message

In the 6th episode of our “Bitesize Insights for Data Driven Leaders” Series, we have Carlos Rivero, Chief Data Officer at Commonwealth of Virginia. Carlos started college wanting to become a civil engineer to help with his father’s business, but later on gravitated towards environmental engineering and ecology given that he lived in Miami and was a witness to the environmental impact on their local marine ecology. Thanks to the advice of one of his professors and mentor, he chose science over engineering. For Carlos, it’s very important to bring people together and have them understand the value of the work they are doing, why they’re doing it and the impact it can have on real world issues. Quotes: "Take money out of the equation and simply focus on what brings you fulfillment and happiness." "It became clear to me that I loved working with data and being able to tell stories from those data assets that I was working with." "One of the basic things that I really enjoyed about those projects was being of service, because it was not just geographic information science that I was working on, it was really at the service of something larger than that, of something that had potential impact in our social sphere and that to me was extraordinarily appealing and that was a big driver for the impact these projects had on my career." Read the full episode summary here: Episode #134 Enjoy Carlos Rivero in our “Bitesize Insights for Data Driven Leaders” Series! --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/datafuturology/message

In the 5th episode of our “Bitesize Insights for Data Driven Leaders” Series, we have our first ever live audience episode with Elisa Koch. She is the Head of Data and Analytics at the AFL - Australian Football League. Elisa spent 10 years working for Avon Cosmetics, mostly in Latin America. That’s where she had her first encounter with marketing analytics and she fell in love with data once she discovered the link it has with customer behavior. Elisa shares her take on data translators and how she considers they are the first people you need to hire. Several organizations are not savvy enough to know how to apply their data and that’s why they need data translators to make their data approachable. Stay tuned to learn more about Elisa and the work she is doing at the AFL towards merging the sports analytics and marketing data worlds together to better understand their fans and grow their audiences. Quotes: "When I figured out that you can use data to try to predict what will happen in the future, that blew my mind." "Ask questions, be curious, do your research and figure it out." "A lot of organizations are not savvy enough to know exactly how to apply data and are even scared of it. The beauty of data translators is they make data approachable." Read the full episode summary here: Episode #133 Enjoy Elisa Koch in our “Bitesize Insights for Data Driven Leaders” Series! --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/datafuturology/message

In episode 4 of our “Bitesize Insights for Data-Driven Leaders” Series, Jeanne Holm is the Chief Data Officer at her hometown, the City of Los Angeles. She works at the cross-section of civic innovation, open data, and education, addressing issues ranging from homelessness to digital equity technology innovation, data and analytics, and public-private partnerships. As CDO, Jeanne focuses on taking data, like the number of people trained in the city’s workforce centers or how sustainable their practices are, and making it available and accessible to the taxpayers. To enable this, she works with individuals within the government that are not data scientists, and provides support and data literacy training in order to facilitate their understanding on  how to structure, manage and put context around data. She also cooperates with entities outside the government, like academic researchers, businesses, and advocacy groups who want to use the data but need the information and context around it. Quotes: "The thing that connects all of these different pieces is wanting to tell stories that help people create different actions." "A Chief Data Officer focuses on organising and helping to bring out the data from different parts of the organisation and then either to make it easier to share within the organisation or to also share that out with the public." "If you set the directions, set the pace, and support people and are compassionate to their own issues; I think you can build and lead an amazing group of people." Read the full episode summary here: Episode #132 Enjoy Jeanne Holm in our “Bitesize Insights for Data-Driven Leaders” Series! --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/datafuturology/message