Ten years ago, everyone wanted to be doing machine learning. Go to a data conference - someone was presenting on ML. Advertising a data role - just mention ML and applications would 10X. It was the promise of machine learning that inspired an entire generation of data scientists. I know. I was one of them. And then came the statistic that revealed what many data scientists knew but few wanted to admit: around 90% of ML initiatives never made it to deployment. The ideas were there. The...
5 days ago • 1 min read
Last week, I stepped on the fancy scales at my gym for the first time in four months. You know the ones. They don’t just tell you your weight. They tell you your muscle mass, bone density, basal metabolic rate… Basically, everything short of your star sign. The results were horrifying. Everything had gone backwards. I’d even managed to lose 400 grams of muscle. I’d been training five days a week and made no major changes to my diet. I was lifting heavier weights than ever before. None of it...
8 days ago • 1 min read
AI can get anyone to 60% of a finished output in minutes. A novice with the right prompt can produce something that looks polished, credible and complete. And to anyone who doesn’t know what “finished” actually looks like, it might even pass for the real thing. But getting from 60% to 100% - the part where real insight lives - is a different problem entirely. In a recent Forbes article, Brent Dykes mapped out exactly what happens in that gap with his Four Zones of AI Productivity framework....
12 days ago • 1 min read
Back in the day, while doing my PhD, I listened to podcasts pretty much nonstop. It helped break the monotony caused by hours of data analysis. Over time, the hosts of those podcasts took on god-like status in my mind. One that particularly stood out to me was Pilar Alessandra’s “On the Page”, a podcast that began with a theme song so catchy I still find myself humming it to this day. I wanted to be just like her, but never thought it possible. For starters, I didn’t even know who to turn to...
15 days ago • 1 min read
“Analyse this dataset and come back with any insights you find.” This was one of the first requests I ever received as a data scientist, and to be perfectly honest, I didn’t quite understand what it meant. Sure, I understood the “analyse the dataset” part, but at the time, I had no idea what my stakeholder meant when she spoke of “insights”. I interpreted the word as a synonym for “interesting facts”. And that’s exactly how she politely responded when I returned with my findings. “That’s...
19 days ago • 1 min read
“I haven’t written code by hand in months - and honestly, I don’t want to anymore.” This admission came from one of the most capable data scientists I know. Until recently, he was shipping enterprise-scale code at a top multinational company - without writing a line of it himself. He now builds cutting-edge AI tools for small businesses. For him, understanding the architecture, logic and business context was enough. His ability to hand-code was slowly atrophying, but something new was growing...
22 days ago • 1 min read
The first thing I ever published that attracted any real attention was just after I finished my PhD. I started writing the puzzle page for Actuaries Magazine as a way of filling my suddenly empty weekends. I didn’t expect it to lead to anything. Yet, in the years that followed, people would walk up to me at conferences and want to shake my hand because I was “the puzzle girl”. Once someone even offered me a job because of it. Prof Rob Hyndman, one of the world’s leading applied statisticians,...
26 days ago • 1 min read
Even at the best of times, the world is an uncertain place. Right now, we are far from the best of times. In periods of high uncertainty, people naturally seek out anything that might reduce that uncertainty - even just a little. Politicians understand this instinctively, which is why we've seen so many world leaders addressing their people in recent weeks, with varying degrees of success. The greater the uncertainty, the greater the value of any reduction in it. This principle doesn't stop...
29 days ago • 1 min read
When I started my career, data science didn’t exist as a field. I trained as an actuary and statistician and those were the tools I relied on in my earliest roles. Then, around 10 years ago, I started hearing about the wonders of machine learning and became worried that my traditional training was no longer enough. So, despite already having a PhD in Statistics, I went back and completed a Masters in Machine Learning. Then came the AI wave – ChatGPT, large language models, generative AI – and...
about 1 month ago • 1 min read