Talk Title: Experiments in The DataLab: Catalysing Data Innovation at National Scale

The Data Lab is an innovation center that delivers social and economic benefit to Scotland by bringing industry, the public sector, and academia together to exploit new opportunities from data. Brian Hills shares insights and lessons learned during the center's first phase, presents example case studies from a range of industries, and outlines the data science techniques used to drive value in those domains. Brian will present this in the context of The Data Lab's three pillar strategy:

1. Collaborative innovation: enabling collaborative projects between academia and industry to drive economic and social benefit
2. Nurturing skills and talent: developing a range of education programs, in partnership with industry, to tackle the skills challenge covering MScs to PhDs and executive education to online training
3. Community building: creating a network of communities for data science across the country and internationally, from technical-level meetups and to our annual data innovation festival, DataFest.

Biography:
Brian is responsible for technical leadership and the skills portfolio at The Data Lab.  He has 20 years experience in analytics and software engineering joining the Data Lab from Skyscanner where he launched and grew the Business Intelligence team.  Prior to this, Brian held analytics and engineering roles with Sumerian and HP and was recognised in the 2017 Information Age Top 50 Data Leaders in the UK, winning a best in class award for his contribution to data science and analytics.