Real World Data Science brand
  • Case studies
  • Ideas
  • Careers
  • Viewpoints
  • About RWDS
    • Who we are
    • How to contribute
    • Contact us

‘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

Looking to distant landscape through binoculars, digital art. Image created by Bing Image Creator.

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

3D render of a conceptual visualisation of large language models by artist Tim West. Photo by Google DeepMind on Unsplash.

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

Photo of ChatGPT homescreen, by Levart_Photographer on Unsplash.

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
No matching items

    [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

    Photo of Stephanie Hare by Mitzi de Margary. Photo supplied by Stephanie Hare, used with permission.

    ‘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

    Bikers in front of the United States Capitol in Washington DC. Photo by Andy Feliciotti on Unsplash.

    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

    Photo of Heidi Seibold

    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
    No matching items

    Data Science Bites

    A shopping trolley being pushed around a supermarket. Photo by Marjan Blan | @marjanblan on Unsplash.

    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

    A researcher in a field shines a light on stylised waves of noise, as if attempting to identify or extract a signal. Image generated by DALL.E 2 from prompts provided by Real World Data Science.

    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

    Photo taken from the backseat of a Lyft vehicle. Driver is seen in profile to the left of the picture. Phone is mounted on the dash and displays a maps app that is tracking the route to the passenger's destination. Photo by Paul Hanaoka on Unsplash.

    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
    No matching items

    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

    Black and white portrait photo of Jasmine Holdsworth. Still from Real World Data Science video interview.

    ‘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

    Black and white portrait photo of Sami Rahman. Photo supplied by Sami Rahman, used with permission.

    ‘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

    Black and white portrait photo of Tamanna Haque.

    ‘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
    No matching items

    Editors’ Blog

    Looking to distant landscape through binoculars, digital art. Image created by Bing Image Creator.

    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

    An illustration of a colorful rainbow, with each band of the rainbow featuring a selection of numbers to represent data. Image created by Bing Image Creator.

    Data science as ‘a rainbow’, and other definitions
    Data science means different things to different people. Former RSS president Sylvia Richardson has described it as ‘a rainbow of interconnected disciplines’. What’s your…
    Brian Tarran
    Mar 29, 2023

    A teacher is marking homework and trying to decide whether a written piece of text has been created by a student or by a large language model, digital art. Created by DALL·E, prompt by Real World Data Science.

    OpenAI’s text classifier won’t calm fears about AI-written homework
    Educators are worried about ChatGPT being used by students for homework assignments, so OpenAI has released a tool to classify whether text is human- or AI-written. But…
    Brian Tarran
    Mar 15, 2023
    No matching items

    Published by

    About us

    Our aims
    Our team
    Partners and funders
    Contact us

    Contribute

    Call for contributions
    Contributor guidelines
    Style guide

    Follow us

    GitHub
    Twitter
    LinkedIn
    Mastodon

    Copyright © 2023 Royal Statistical Society

    Edit this page

    Report an issue

    Terms & Conditions