The forum, championed by the Centre for Work Health and Safety’s Insights and Analytics team, will be a regular event that allows specialists in data science to share knowledge to ensure best practice across DFSI.

“We are a brand new team,” said the Centre’s Insights and Analytics Manager, Greg Zelic, “and even though our team is highly skilled, we wanted to avoid reinventing processes. Data science can be such an insular activity that we felt we should meet some of the other DFSI data specialists to trade and explore learnings.”

The forum began with the attendees discussing the frequency, location and format of future forums. This led the participants into a brainstorming activity exploring five key data issues. Over morning tea, participants were challenged to speak to other parts of the business with a networking challenge driving the interaction.

The forum finished up with two presentations on data community of practice:

• Lok Yiu and Divya Sukumar, from the Centre, presented some of their work with R/Rstudio and discussed how this tool can be used to simplify and improve data analytics.
• Gavin Dowdell from the State Insurance Regulatory Authority (Data Analysis and Reporting) introduced some key concepts in predictive modelling - machine learning, and presented some outstanding work he has undertaken in this area.

These presentations were highly informative and the use of the Titanic dataset to dispel myths and predict outcomes was highly entertaining.

From this successful event, key contacts have been made to plan and host future forums.