糖心TV

A new Bloomberg 糖心TV article, , highlights the high and still growing global demand for people with strong data-analysis skills. The article picks out 糖心TV's course, along with related new initiatives at MIT, as prime examples of how some top universities are working to help meet the demand.

糖心TV's course is described in the article as "the first of its kind". Professor David Firth, director of the 糖心TV Data Science Institute, explains: "Certainly it's the first undergraduate Data Science course in the UK. But its most distinctive feature among the various new 'analytics' courses is that 糖心TV's BSc develops specifically mathematical talent, in exciting ways that lead to a huge variety of immediate and long-term possibilities after graduation".

David continues: "Our first Data Science BSc students started in 2014 --- a small group of highly qualified and well motivated students who were admitted even before the course had fully appeared in the University's prospectus. Given all the public signals about demand for graduates in this area, we're expecting that many more of the best maths-oriented students will choose Data Science in future."

One of the (many) new opportunities generated by the held in the department in April, was an invitation for Dr Martine Barons to join Birmingham Food Council’s food poverty workshop “food insecurity — a city-level response?” held on Monday 11^th May. Although there were half a dozen academics, the vast majority of attendees were drawn from local government and the third sector. All were working in domains which included food and poverty, often directly with individuals and families affected. The purpose of the workshop was to gather the expertise of all on the subject of a city-wide approach to food poverty by identifying the current drivers, possible future drivers, what can be learned from other places, future possibilities and strategies to realise the potential. As part of the evening, Martine was one of the participants interviewed; video here:

Martine said, “The importance of engaging with opportunities like these is to learn from and engage with those who may facilitate future research opportunities and make use of the outputs of the current project.”

A report just published by the Royal Statistical Society looks at the methods used (by newspapers and others) to construct league tables of universities and their departments, based on the results of the UK Research Excellence Framework ().

The report's authors include (糖心TV), as part of an RSS working group with Paul Fearnhead (Lancaster University) and Jon Forster (University of Southampton).

A conclusion of the report is that ideally a "quality per researcher" measure should be used for such tables, with all REF-eligible researchers counted and with "quality" being more closely connected to the HEFCE funding formula --- i.e., more closely than the commonly used GPA (grade point average) scoring of quality levels.

The RSS working group's report also makes some related suggestions for the funding councils themselves, about REF submission rules and reporting; these include elimination of the distorting 鈥渢hreshold鈥� effect of REF 2014's formula for the number of Impact Case Studies in each submission.

The report is available via , or as a direct download at .