AAi NewsBytes March 2015
Mar., 2015 Edition
At AAi, we believe data scientists not only need a suite of technical skills – they also need to be creative, have sound communication skills, and be good collaborators. The archetypal image of the data expert poring over a computer in isolation is fast giving way to the expectation that data analysts will work as team members to achieve the best solution, whether in business, telecommunications, finance, law, healthcare, or any other field.
It is good to see that we are not alone in advocating an interdisciplinary approach in our vision statement. A recent Human Capital Magazine article highlights how the inter-disciplinary perspective is a proposed strategy for helping corporate Australia to close the analytics gap. At UTS, we do our part and offer related short courses, in-house training, Master and Doctor of Philosophy Degrees (Research) and Master Degree (Course Work) to bridge the skills gap. We are happy to see the diversity of intake and high percentage of part-time students adopting these programs.
AAi is also working on an Analytics Capability Framework to address the issue of bridging the gap. Contact us at advancedanalytics@uts.edu.au if you would like to know more, or have a view to share.
Remember: there’s no shortage of useful data in most organisations and government departments which, when properly mined and interpreted by AAi, can create unexpected opportunities for driving productivity and business growth.
Advanced Analytics Institute
Dr Shonali Krishnasway, Institute for Infocomm Research, Visits AAi Dr Shonali Krishnaswamy, Head of the Data Analytics Department at the Institute for Infocomm Research (I2R), visited AAi recently in a visit coordinated by Contact Singapore, Sydney. Dr Krishnaswamy presented an AAi Seminar on 4 March on the interaction of research and real-world applications in the area of Big Data Analytics, in which she discussed a diverse range of analytics case studies from industry sectors such as Banking and Finance, Manufacturing, Telco and Transportation. The presentation effectively illustrated how data science innovation and R&D are being leveraged to create transformational impact in these industries. The talk also briefly covered the many exciting opportunities for both fundamental research and applications-driven research in Data Science. Read more here | |||
Sentiment Polarity Detection helps discover user opinions Text analytics plays an important role in understanding users' preferences or focus of attention through the analysis of text written by users, especially in the area of e-commerce. A typical application of text analytics is the use of sentiment polarity detection to discover customer opinion on merchants or goods from comments or reviews made by customers. AAi data scientist and senior lecturer Dr Guandong Xu adopts text mining in recommender systems to improve the accuracy of predicting which merchants users are most likely to visit. His work provides an aggregated view by considering both individual preferences and community interest via utility theory, in relation to which, Dr Xu has developed an online demo system. Read more here. | |||
Connecting rules from paired miRNA and mRNA expression data sets of Hepatitis C virus patients Intensive research based on the inverse expression relationship has been undertaken to discover the miRNA-mRNA regulatory modules involved in Hepatitis C virus (HCV) infection, the leading cause of chronic liver disease. However, biological studies in other fields have also found that inverse expression relationship is not the only regulatory relationship between miRNAs and their targets, and some miRNAs can positively regulate a mRNA by binding at the 5' UTR of the mRNA. The rule discovery method is used to integrate the binding information and expression profile for identifying HCV miRNA-mRNA regulatory modules and can be applied to the study of the expression profiles of other complex human diseases. Read more here. | |||
Want to Get Ahead of the Field? The full program of AAi short courses is now available at the Institute’s website. The course on 23 March covers the area of Data Visualisation. This course is designed to take beginners through an introduction to Tableau Software and Data Visualisation, and is suitable for the beginner to intermediate Tableau user, as well as anyone who works with data, regardless of technical or analytical background. Throughout the day, attendees will learn how to manage, transform and analyse complex data. Our hands-on training will enable participants to learn a variety of data insight techniques, working with a number of visualisation options and combining them in interactive dashboards using Tableau Software. To register, click here. |