The explosion of data unleashed by the internet has had a significant impact on research in the 21st century. An interdisciplinary field called data science has emerged over the past few decades, bringing together statistics, engineering, maths, and computer science. Universities have established a vast range of data science programmes and faculties, but a lot of innovation is happening in the private sector. The availability of high-quality research has expanded - it can be found in preprints, conference proceedings, and even Medium blog posts, in addition to traditional peer-reviewed journals.
Join a panel discussion with data scientists from leading academic institutions and private companies to learn more about the state of data science research in the 21st century.
The overall themes of the discussion will include:
- Data science research in a private company vs an academic institution
- Collaborations between industry and academia
- How data scientists stay up to date with the latest research
- How data scientists publish research
- Degrees in data science
You can submit your questions to our panellists when registering for the webinar.
Date and Time: Wednesday, 13 May, 4pm BST
CHAIR
Dr Yin Yin Lu, Product Manager, Researcher
Yin is a Product Manager at Researcher. She completed her DPhil at the Oxford Internet Institute (University of Oxford) in 2019, which investigated the resonance and rhetoric of Brexit tweets through both qualitative and data science methods. She has been involved with data-oriented research projects for the Rockefeller Foundation, the Alan Turing Institute, and the Centre for Socio-Legal Studies at the Oxford Law Faculty. She was a visiting researcher at the Fraunhofer Institute for Computer Graphics Research under a Horizon 2020 big data grant, and founded the #SocialHumanities research network at the University of Oxford to unite social media researchers from across all disciplines.
Prior to moving to Oxford, Yin was a project manager at a digital media agency in NYC. She also has five years of experience in the publishing industry (Pearson Education, Columbia University Press, New York Review of Books) and has been interviewed by numerous media outlets on digital media and politics (including Sky News, Wired, the Guardian, the Times, the Telegraph, and El País).
PANELLISTS
Alexandra Darmon, Research Scientist, Facebook
Alex has always been in between academia and industry. After completing her Master’s degree from the University of Oxford in Mathematics and Computer Science she joined the start-up world to apply her learnings. She was part of the founding team of Researcher, built many data science products from scratch and lead the research department at Fospha. Alex is now a Research Scientist at Facebook tackling exciting problems in the industry with powerful new methodologies. In addition, she kept strong links with the University of Oxford and worked on publishing her academic papers.
Professor Michael Thelwall, Professor of Data Science, University of Wolverhampton
Mike is a Professor of Data Science and leader of the Statistical Cybermetrics Research Group at the University of Wolverhampton, which he joined in 1989. He is also Docent at the Department of Information Studies at Åbo Akademi University, and a Professor at the University of Malaya. His PhD was in Pure Mathematics from the University of Lancaster. His current research field includes identifying and analysing web phenomena using quantitative-led research methods, including altmetrics and sentiment analysis, and has pioneered an information science approach to link analysis. Mike has developed a wide range of tools for gathering and analysing web data, including hyperlink analysis, sentiment analysis and content analysis for Twitter, YouTube, MySpace, blogs and the web in general. His 400+ publications include 355 refereed journal articles and three books, including Introduction to Webometrics. He is an associate editor of the Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology and sits on four other editorial boards. For more information, see: http://www.scit.wlv.ac.uk/~cm1993/mycv.html
Dr Ruth Garcia, Data Scientist, Spotify
Ruth is a Data Scientist at Spotify in London focusing on user engagement and metric setting for the Spotify Kids App. Previously, she was a data scientist at Skyscanner and previous to that a computational social science researcher at the Oxford Internet Institute (University of Oxford). She obtained her PhD at Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona and developed her thesis at Yahoo Labs Barcelona. Her work has been exposed in several international conferences. In her free time, she enjoys hiking, cooking, and salsa dancing.
Dr Bertram Vidgen, Research Fellow, Alan Turing Institute
Bertie is a Research Fellow in Online Harms within the public policy programme of the Turing, the UK’s national institute for data science and artificial intelligence. His research focuses on detecting, analysing, and countering online hate speech, examining it in the context of both news and social media, as well as extremism and misinformation. In his work, he primarily uses computational social science methods, including machine learning, natural language processing, and statistical modelling.
Before he joined the Turing, Bertie studied for a DPhil at the University of Oxford's Oxford Internet Institute, where he researched Islamophobic hate speech among followers of UK political parties on Twitter. He holds a BA from the University of Warwick in History and Politics and an MA from the University of Essex in Ideology and Discourse Analysis. Bertie also runs an independent consulting practice.
Karan Choksi, Data Scientist, Researcher
Karan is a Data Scientist at Researcher. He studied Informatics at the University of Washington, Seattle where he focused primarily on Data Science and UI/UX Design. At UW he learned to look at data as a puzzle that reveals beautiful stories when parts of it are solved. The idea of being able to create a narrative from what would otherwise seem like chaos is what he loves the most about Data Science. He is most interested in sports data and has worked on many personal projects involving basketball and cricket.
