Last week, Professor Deborah Ashby presented the public lecture: Pigeon-holes and mustard seeds: Growing capacity to use data for society at the University of Plymouth.
Speaker: Professor Deborah Ashby OBE, Imperial College London, President of the Royal Statistical Society
The Royal Statistical Society was founded to address social problems ‘through the collection and classification of facts’, leading to many developments in the collection of data, the development of methods for analysing them, and the development of statistics as a profession. Nearly 200 years later an explosion in computational power has led, in turn, to an explosion in data. We outline the challenges and the actions needed to exploit that data for the public good, and to address the step change in statistical skills and capacity development necessary to enable our vision of a world where data are at the heart of understanding and decision-making.
