Speaker: Dr. Steven Scott, Chief Scientist at ShareThis, Inc.
Title: “Making sense of the soup. Statistics, Data Science, AI, ML, Analytics, Data Mining, and whatever they call it next.”

Abstract: Data analysis is an ancient exercise that is currently going through something of a revolution. I will summarize what I see as the current state of the field, explain how different prominent groups view the foundations of data analysis, and argue that probabilistic reasoning should play a larger role than it currently does. The talk will conclude with advice about how young people can best participate in, and shape, the future of the field.

Bio: Steven L. Scott is the Chief Scientist at ShareThis, Inc., a startup whose mission is to liberate behavioral user data from behind the walled gardens owned by tech giants. Dr. Scott holds a PhD from the Harvard Statistics Department. He has had a 25 year career spanning academics and industry. He has served on the faculty of the USC Marshall School of Business, held director level positions at Capital One and Google, and helped organize and grow the data science capabilities at multiple startups. His academic work specializes in Bayesian computation, with an emphasis on hidden Markov models, latent variable methods for logistic regression and support vector machines, Bayesian structural time series models ("bsts"), causal modeling, and multiarmed bandit experiments, among other topics. Dr. Scott is the author of the widely used "bsts" package in R, and a co-author of Google's "CausalImpact" methodology

The Applied Mathematics in Industry Seminar (AMIS) series is primarily focused on highlighting how mathematics is used in various different careers and is geared toward undergraduates. Seminars typically require little or no advanced mathematical knowledge and are open to anyone.

This seminar will be held virtually. Please click the join stream button and follow the instructions to attend.