DSAi Podcast updates — 15th April 2021
Hi everyone,
It’s been a busy couple of weeks and we’ve added some more podcasts to the mix. Here’s a recap of what we’ve added, including link and summary:
Podcast 3 — Oliver Nunn, Australian Energy Market Commission
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/204riBfxk3Z9aJi6XNtaML
Another week another interview for the podcast. This time we chat with the esteemed Oliver Nunn from the AEMC. He’s been a long-time economist in energy markets and offered some wonderful insights into his many years of experience working with data, statistics and technology in that space.
We go through topics such as how he built data models for the various power systems needed to run the energy infrastructure and markets in Australia s well as the importance of understanding methods and input assumptions when forecasts are made.
There’s so much value in this chat so check it out below. Also take a look at episodes 1 and 2 for more insights from other data experts
Podcast 4 — Martin Wong, Defence, Science and Technology Group (Australian Department of Defence)
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/78113zBsHS3fFs0Iu2TXxg
The Australian Defense, Science, and Technology Group is conducting research activities incorporating Artificial Intelligence to see how it can help with decision-making to solve real-world problems. In this episode, Martin from DST discusses how wargaming is being used in conjunction with Ai to push the state of the art in planning for the Disaster in the Joadia Islands Gameathon.
Martin explains the concept of red teaming to identify situations that can affect strategy and to test the weaknesses of overall systems with the goal of making future relief efforts more effective. Martin also discusses the two major elements of the Joadia Gamethon — the challenge of designing a game to incorporate problem elements of the real world & how we can leverage AI technology to help humans make decisions extracted from games.
Podcast 5 — Grant Coble-Neal, Western Power
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/204riBfxk3Z9aJi6XNtaML
Another week another interviewee up to be showcased. In keeping up with the economists we’ve had on we now speak with Grant Coble-Neal, the Forecasting and Data Science Manager at Western Power, a utility provider in Western Australia.
We talk about the operational issues that come up when handling data at a large energy transporter. We look at the types of data sources they manage and collect to enable better forecasts and the need for data science teams to enable the business units with their data models and regularly check/audit them.
Lots of value in this talk for us and it continues to be great to learn how others do things. There’s a lot we learned from this talk and we hope you do too.
Podcast 6 — Girish Nair, Bank of America, Merrill Lynch
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/1vaTxflyINP8L8sdyKwXAs
Back to the finance talks and in this session, we chat with Girish Nair (Director, Global and Asia Pac Quantitative Strategist) at Bank of America Merill Lynch (BAML).
We learned where Girish started his data journey, from a financial analyst looking at financial statements to where he is now running quantitative strategy and analysing millions of data points to find common threads for investors at BAML.
While his specialization is in analysing equity markets, we also discussed the importance of data for any business and how it helps companies to have more data just as much as an influx of capital can help them.
We discussed alternative data and what kind of sources are used in the investment space to analyse companies from satellite and shipping data to news and social media.
As with all other guests, we discussed challenges that our guests overcame, and for Girish, it was about how the lag in decision making can add up to costs in the millions of dollars per year. Accessibility and adoption of technology have helped in his pursuits to answer these challenges.
Find out more about these topics and more in the interview.
Follow our podcasts on both Spotify and Apple for more interviews we have coming up.
