Real World Data Science

‘For me, data science is about bridging the gap between business requirements and the data that businesses have’

Jasmine Holdsworth, data scientist at Expedia Group, explains how inspiring mentors, R-Ladies meetups, and a commitment to learning (and teaching) helped shape her career path.

Welcome to the home of Real World Data Science, a new project from the Royal Statistical Society. This site and its content are being created and curated by data science practitioners and leaders with a single goal in mind: to help you deliver high quality, ethical, impactful data science in your workplace.

Latest content

What’s the future of data science and AI in an LLM world?

Osama Rahman, director of the Data Science Campus at the UK Office for National Statistics, shared his thoughts on the past, present, and future of data science at an event…

Brian Tarran

May 26, 2023

Large language models: Do we need to understand the maths, or simply recognise the limitations?

Do we need to understand the inner workings of large language models before we use them? Or, is it enough to simply teach people to recognise that model outputs can’t always…

Brian Tarran

May 18, 2023

How is ChatGPT changing data science?

We sit down with the Royal Statistical Society’s Data Science and AI Section to hear how large language models are becoming part of the data science toolkit, and to consider…

Brian Tarran

May 11, 2023

[Laws and regulations] are important, they’re necessary, but they’re insufficient. You can act a lot faster if you can get people preventing stuff from being built in the first place, and that means you need to have a culture of people who can see something and sound the alarm and go, ‘Wait a minute, hang on. That’s not okay.’

Stephanie Hare on why we need a culture of technology ethics

Listen to the interview

Interviews

‘I’m way more into prevention than cure’: Stephanie Hare on why we need a culture of technology ethics

Stephanie Hare, author of ‘Technology is Not Neutral’, talks to Real World Data Science about the ‘wicked problem’ of technology and AI ethics, and why laws and regulations…

Brian Tarran

Apr 28, 2023

US legislators get their data science act together

A bill introduced in the US Congress wants to make funds available to develop data science and data literacy education across the United States. We sit down with education…

Brian Tarran

Mar 6, 2023

Why open science is ‘just good science in a digital era’

Real World Data Science speaks with statistician and data scientist Heidi Seibold about open science: what it means, the benefits of it, and how to move towards it.

Brian Tarran

Feb 3, 2023

Data Science Bites

Using ‘basket complementarity’ to make product recommendations

Purchase suggestions – e.g., “if you are buying that, you might also want this” – are, to a large extent, informed by the concept of complementarity: that certain products…

Moinak Bhaduri

Mar 2, 2023

Pulling patterns out of data with a graph

Large volumes of data are pouring in every day from scientific experiments, so much so that it is now commonplace to perform dimension reduction in order to reduce a large…

Andrew Saydjari

Jan 24, 2023

Determining the best way to route drivers for ridesharing via reinforcement learning

A/B testing is often used to evaluate the impact of design ‘treatments’ — for example, are people who see advert A more likely to buy something than those who see advert B?…

Brian King

Dec 13, 2022

As I’ve transitioned into management, maintaining my coding prowess is an ongoing challenge. I stay sharp by doing data science and infrastructure development for fun, leveraging tools like ChatGPT and AirOps where I’m rusty.

Sami Rahman, head of data engineering and data platform at Penguin Random House

Read Sami’s career profile

Career profiles

‘For me, data science is about bridging the gap between business requirements and the data that businesses have’

Jasmine Holdsworth ‘fell in love’ with data science while employed as a data analyst at Stack Overflow. Now working as a data scientist at Expedia Group, she explains how…

Brian Tarran

May 24, 2023

‘I always thought someone like me couldn’t work in data, let alone data science’

Sami Rahman, head of data engineering and data platform at Penguin Random House, parlayed a psychology degree into a data science career – inspired by a talk on machine…

Brian Tarran

Apr 24, 2023

‘Data science challenges you to keep learning – there’ll always be new advances in the field’

Tamanna Haque, lead data scientist at Jaguar Land Rover, shares her route into data science: from pursuing a maths degree at Manchester to analysing vehicle data for a major…

Brian Tarran

Mar 28, 2023

Editors’ Blog

‘For me, data science is about bridging the gap between business requirements and the data that businesses have’

Latest content

What’s the future of data science and AI in an LLM world?

Large language models: Do we need to understand the maths, or simply recognise the limitations?

How is ChatGPT changing data science?

Interviews

‘I’m way more into prevention than cure’: Stephanie Hare on why we need a culture of technology ethics

US legislators get their data science act together

Why open science is ‘just good science in a digital era’

Data Science Bites

Using ‘basket complementarity’ to make product recommendations

Pulling patterns out of data with a graph

Determining the best way to route drivers for ridesharing via reinforcement learning

As I’ve transitioned into management, maintaining my coding prowess is an ongoing challenge. I stay sharp by doing data science and infrastructure development for fun, leveraging tools like ChatGPT and AirOps where I’m rusty.

Career profiles

‘For me, data science is about bridging the gap between business requirements and the data that businesses have’

‘I always thought someone like me couldn’t work in data, let alone data science’

‘Data science challenges you to keep learning – there’ll always be new advances in the field’

Editors’ Blog

What’s the future of data science and AI in an LLM world?

Data science as ‘a rainbow’, and other definitions

OpenAI’s text classifier won’t calm fears about AI-written homework

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