On 31st October, our 51st Belz Lecture, Statistics is the Crown Jewel of Data Science, was delivered by Antony Ugoni, Director of Global Matching and Analytics at SEEK, to large crowd of 200 people.  

Antony spoke about the value that mathematics and statistics knowledge can add to data science, how important it is to really understand the problem that you're working on, and the need for passion when teaching students about statistics.

He described the five top statistics concepts applicable to his work: ANOVA, randomness, the Central Limit Theorem, the Bootstrap, and hypothesis testing. Although the Google search algorithm may suggest that "statistics is hard", Antony's breakdown of these five concepts was very accessible and made statistics far less intimidating.

Listening to this very entertaining talk from an accomplished statistician/data scientist, I had no doubt in my mind that Antony is incredibly passionate about statistics and deserves his place among his heroes on the “Honour Board” of Belz Lecturers.

Rheanna Mainzer