As we enter the final few hours of 2023 I just wanted to say a huge thank you to all of you who have made my first year as Chair of the RSS DS&AI Section memorable and educational!
Our focus for this year was “Effective and Efficient Data Science” - we wanted to really highlight what made our field critical, beyond the flashy hype that was flooding both the news (and the minds of business leaders) at the start of 2023.
Leading up to the RSS Conference in September we ran a series of events on “How to avoid becoming an ornamental data scientist” in collaboration with some of the regional RSS groups in Wales, Scotland, and at our Errol street headquarters in London. We also surveyed you for your opinions on Data Science so that we could accurately represent you in our ongoing work to support the Advanced Data Science Professional certification and responding to calls for evidence from the UK Parliament for the future of AI. As a committee, we are aware that we have the most diverse set of voices among our readership and it’s critical to us that you are heard when it comes to policy. I was so pleased by the passion and volume of engagement that we had to our events and surveys - thank you all and please continue to share your views with us so that legislation is influenced by you, the practioners.
We also had a range of events through the year to help with best practises, from Florian’s amazing presentation on the Turing Institute’s International Standards for AI in July, Martin’s session on Evaluating Artificial Intelligence in October, Will and Jennifer with How to deploy and scale AI models in production in November, and my own session with the Office for Statistics Regulation on Data Relevancy.
After many of these events, discussions continued with drinks afterwards, including the Christmas mixer after our AGM (this time with hats after feedback that we were difficult to find!)
We’ve also published various articles with thoughts from committee members, including Martin’s speech to the European Commission on AI for Humanity, and both Martin and Piers discussing topics on their podcast.
Our monthly newsletter has had some impressive feedback and we’re grateful to all of you who have highlighted some of the advancements that may not otherwise have been spread through the community. Huge appreciation goes to Piers for compiling this, if you haven’t read the December roundup then please do grab a cuppa and enjoy it here.
Thank you all for your input over the past 12 months. Please do get in touch if you have any feedback as we start to plan an exciting calendar of events for the next 12 months.
Watch out for our January newsletter in the next few days to start 2024 in style!