DataCaf‪é‬ Jason & Jeremy

A key part of the scientific method is communicating the insights to an audience, for any field of research or problem context. This is where the ultimate value comes from: by sharing the cutting-edge results that can improve our understanding of the world and help deliver new innovations in people's lives. Effective science communication sits at the intersection of data, research, and the art of storytelling.

In this episode of the DataCafé we have the pleasure of welcoming Laurie Winkless, a physicist, author and science communications expert. Laurie has extensive experience in science journalism, having written numerous fascinating articles for Forbes Magazine, Wired, Esquire, and The Economist. She has also authored two science books which we will talk about today: 
Sticky: The Secret Science of SurfacesScience and the City: The Mechanics behind the MetropolisLaurie tells us about the amazing insights in her books from her research, interviews and discussions with leading scientists around the world. She gives us an idea of how the scientific method sits at the core of this work. Her efforts involve moving across many complicated data landscapes to uncover and articulate the key insights of the scientists working in these fields. And she does this through the art of storytelling, in a manner that can capture people's imagination whilst educating and surprising them at the same time.

Interview guest: Laurie Winkless, physicist, author, science communicator. Contactable via her website, and on twitter, mastodon, and linkedin.


Further information:
www.lauriewinkless.com "Why do things stick to each other?" Talk by Laurie Winkless at The Royal Institution.https://twitter.com/laurie_winkless https://scicomm.xyz/@LaurieWinkless https://www.linkedin.com/in/laurie-winkless/ Sticky: The Secret Science of Surfaces Science and the City: The Mechanics behind the Metropolis 







 
Thanks for joining us in the DataCafé. You can follow us on twitter @DataCafePodcast and feel free to contact us about anything you've heard here or think would be an interesting topic in the future.

Culture is a key enabler of innovation in an organisation. Culture underpins the values that are important to people and the motivations for their behaviours. When these values and behaviours align with the goals of innovation, it can lead to high performance across teams that are tasked with the challenge of leading, inspiring and delivering innovation. Many scientists and researchers are faced with these challenges in various scenarios, yet may be unaware of the level of influence that comes from the culture they are part of.

In this episode we talk about what it means to design and embed a culture of innovation. We outline some of our findings in literature about the levels of culture that may be invisible or difficult to measure. Assessing culture helps understand the ways it can empower people to experiment and take risks, and the importance this has for innovation. And where a culture is deemed to be limiting innovation, action can be taken to motivate the right culture and steer the organisation towards a better chance of success.

Futher Reading
Paper: Hogan & Coote (2014) Organizational Culture, Innovation and Performance (via www.researchgate.net)Book: Johnson & Scholes (1999) Exploring Corporate Strategy: Text and Cases Article: Understanding Organisational Culture - Checklist by CMI (via www.managers.org.uk)Article: The Cultural Web (via www.mindtools.com)Paper: Mossop et al. (2013) Analysing the hidden curriculum: use of a cultural web (via www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov)Book: Bruch & Vogel (2011) Fully Charged: How Great Leaders Boost Their Organization’s Energy and Ignite High Performance (via reading.ac.uk)Webinar: Bruch (2012) Fully Charged: How Great Leaders Boost Their Organization’s Energy and Ignite High Performance (via hbr.org)Article: Pisano (2019) The Hard Truth About Innovative Cultures (via hbr.org) 
Some links above may require payment or login. We are not endorsing them or receiving any payment for mentioning them. They are provided as is. Often free versions of papers are available and we would encourage you to investigate.

Recording date: 12 Aug 2022
Thanks for joining us in the DataCafé. You can follow us on twitter @DataCafePodcast and feel free to contact us about anything you've heard here or think would be an interesting topic in the future.

Do you have multiple devices connected to your internet fighting for your bandwidth? Are you asking your children (or even neighbours!) to get off the network so you can finish an important call? Recent lockdowns caused huge network contention as everyone moved to online meetings and virtual classrooms. This is an optimisation challenge that requires advanced modelling and simulation to tackle. How can a network provider know how much bandwidth to provision to a town or a city to cope with peak demands? That's where agent-based simulations come in - to allow network designers to anticipate and then plan for high-demand events, applications and trends.

In this episode of the DataCafé we hear from Dr. Lucy Gullon,  AI and Optimisation Research Specialist at Applied Research, BT. She tells us about the efforts underway to assess the need for bandwidth across different households and locations, and the work they lead to model, simulate, and optimise the provision of that bandwidth across the network of the UK. We hear how planning for peak use, where, say, the nation is streaming a football match is an important consideration. At the same time, reacting to times of low throughput can help to switch off unused circuits and equipment and save a lot of energy.

Interview Guest: Dr. Lucy Gullon,  AI and Optimisation Research Specialist from Applied Research, BT.

Further reading:
BT Research and Development (https://www.bt.com/about/bt/research-and-development)Anylogic agent-based simulator (https://www.anylogic.com/use-of-simulation/agent-based-modeling/)Article: Agent-based modelling (via Wikipedia)Article:Prisoner's Dilemma (via Wikipedia)Article: Crowd Simulation (via Wikipedia)Book: Science and the City  (via Bloomsbury)Research group: Traffic Modelling (via mit.edu)Some links above may require payment or login. We are not endorsing them or receiving any payment for mentioning them. They are provided as is. Often free versions of papers are available and we would encourage you to investigate.

Recording date: 5 May 2022
Interview date: 27 Apr 2022
Thanks for joining us in the DataCafé. You can follow us on twitter @DataCafePodcast and feel free to contact us about anything you've heard here or think would be an interesting topic in the future.

Do you ever find yourself wondering what the data was you used in a project? When was it obtained and where is it stored? Or even just the way to run a piece of code that produced a previous output and needs to be revisited?

Chances are the answer is yes. And it’s likely you have been frustrated by not knowing how to reproduce an output or rerun a codebase or even who to talk to to obtain a refresh of the data - in some way, shape, or form. 

The problem that a lot of project teams face, and data scientists in particular, is the agreement and effort to document their work in a robust and reliable fashion. Documentation is a broad term and can refer to all manner of project details, from the actions captured in a team meeting to the technical guides for executing an algorithm.  

In this bite episode of DataCafé we discuss the challenges around documentation in data science projects (though it applies more broadly). We motivate the need for good documentation through agreement of the responsibilities, expectations, and methods of capturing notes and guides. This can be everything from a summary of the data sources and how to preprocess input data, to project plans and meeting minutes, through to technical details on the dependencies and setups for running codes. 
Thanks for joining us in the DataCafé. You can follow us on twitter @DataCafePodcast and feel free to contact us about anything you've heard here or think would be an interesting topic in the future.

Are people resistant to change? And if so, how do you manage that when trying to introduce and deliver innovation through Data Science?

In this episode of the DataCafé we discuss the challenges faced when trying to land a data science project. There are a number of potential barriers to success that need to be carefully managed. We talk about "change management" and aspects of employee behaviours and stakeholder management that influence the chances of landing a project. This is especially important for embedding innovation in your company or organisation, and implementing a plan to sustain the changes needed to deliver long-term value.


Further reading & references
Kotter's 8 Step Change Plan Armenakis, Achilles & Harris, Stanley & Mossholder, Kevin. (1993). Creating Readiness for Organizational Change. Human Relations. 46. 681-704. 10.1177/001872679304600601. Lewin, K (1944a) Constructs in Field Theory. In D Cartwright(Ed):(1952) Field Theory in Social Science: Selected Theoretical Papers by Kurt Lewin. London: Social Science Paperbacks. pp30-42Lewin, K. (1947) ‘Frontiers in Group Dynamics: Concept, Method and Reality in Social Science; Social Equilibria and Social Change’, Human Relations, 1(1), pp. 5–41. doi: 10.1177/001872674700100103.


Some links above may require payment or login. We are not endorsing them or receiving any payment for mentioning them. They are provided as is. Often free versions of papers are available and we would encourage you to investigate.

Recording date: 10 February 2022
Thanks for joining us in the DataCafé. You can follow us on twitter @DataCafePodcast and feel free to contact us about anything you've heard here or think would be an interesting topic in the future.

Data scientists usually have to write code to prototype software, be it to preprocess and clean data, engineer features, build a model, or deploy a codebase into a production environment or other use case. The evolution of a codebase is important for a number of reasons which is where version control can help, such as:
collaborating with other code developers (due diligence in coordination and delegation)generating backupsrecording versionstracking changesexperimenting and testingand working with agility.In this bite episode of the DataCafé we talk about these motivators for version control and how it can strengthen your code development and teamwork in building a data science model, pipeline or product.

Further reading:
Version control via Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Version_control git-scm via https://git-scm.com/"Version Control & Git" by Jason Byrne via Slideshare https://www.slideshare.net/JasonByrne6/version-control-git-86928367"Learn git" via codecademy https://www.codecademy.com/learn/learn-git"Become a git guru" via Atlassian https://www.atlassian.com/git/tutorialsGitflow workflow via Atlassian https://www.atlassian.com/git/tutorials/comparing-workflows/gitflow-workflow"A successful git branching model" by Vincent Dressian https://nvie.com/posts/a-successful-git-branching-model/ Branching strategies via GitVersion https://gitversion.net/docs/learn/branching-strategies/Recording date: 21 April 2022
Thanks for joining us in the DataCafé. You can follow us on twitter @DataCafePodcast and feel free to contact us about anything you've heard here or think would be an interesting topic in the future.