Stats + Stories The Stats + Stories Team

Pandemic Education History | Stats + Short Stories Episode 332 by The Stats + Stories Team

We’ve always said that data science is a gateway to other fields on this show. From climate change to medical research, knowledge around numbers can be useful in just about every aspect of life. This is why we’ve brought back Kobi Abayomi to talk about his journey using data to get into the music industry on this episodes of Stats+Short Stories

Dr. Kobi Abayomi is the head of science for Gumball Demand Acceleration, a software service company for digital media. Dr. Abayomi was the first and founding Senior Vice President of Data Science at Warner Music Group. He has led data science groups at Barnes and Noble education and Warner media. As a consultant, he has worked with the United Nations Development Programme, the World Bank, the Innocence Project in the New York City Department of Education. He also serves on the Data Science Advisory Council at Seton Hall University where he holds an appointment in the mathematics and computer science department. Kobi, thank you so much for being here today.

Community leaders regularly make decisions that impact the lives of community members. From where green space will be located to what businesses to approve to what public health interventions to put in place. There’s a growing recognition that such decisions should be informed by data that come from the community itself. Community analytics are the focus of this episode of Stats and Stories with guest Kathy Ensor.

Kathy Ensor is a leading national voice in statistics and data science and a recognized expert in the methodological development and application of statistics to advance wisdom, knowledge, and innovation. She is the Noah G. Harding Professor of Statistics at Rice University and director of the Center for Computational Finance and Economic Systems. She served as chair of the Department of Statistics from 1999 through 2013 and is the creator of the Kinder Institute’s Urban Data Platform. Ensor’s research specializes in understanding dependent data and developing computational statistical methods to solve practical problems. Ensor served as the 117th president of the American Statistical Association (ASA), heading the ASA board of directors, and has represented the statistics profession on numerous national boards. She is a fellow of the ASA and AAAS and was inducted into the Texas A&M College of Science Academy of Distinguished Former Students in 2021. Ensor holds a BSE and MS in mathematics from Arkansas State University and a PhD in statistics from Texas A&M University.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention hospital mortality rates in the US were on the decline in the early 2000s, even as total hospitalizations rose. This came after a 1999 U.S. Institute of Medicine report that suggested tens of thousands of individuals died in hospitals unnecessarily each year. The report focused attention on patient safety in modern hospitals. About 70 years earlier, an organization in the American South was also concerned with patient outcomes. That's the focus of this episode of Stats+Stories with guest Melissa Thomasson.

Melissa Thomasson is an American economist. She is the Julian Lange Professor of Economics at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, where she has also been the chair of the Department of Economics. She studies economic history, focusing on the evolution of health insurance and health care in the United States.

More than 27 million individuals are the victims of human trafficking globally that’s according to the US State Department. The 2022 United Nations report on global trafficking suggests that 39 percent of trafficking is associated with sexual exploitation, while also noting that’s likely an underestimate. An initiative at the University of Alabama is working to develop methods for finding evidence of trafficking online, that’s the focus of this episode of Stats and Stories with guest Nickolas Freeman.

Freeman, Ph.D., is an Associate Professor of Operations Management in the Department of Information Systems, Statistics, and Management Science. Dr. Freeman is also an Associate Editor for INFORMS Journal on Applied Analytics (IJAA). He is an active member of the Institute for Operations Research and Management Science (INFORMS) and earned their Certified Analytics Professional (CAP) certification in 2014. He is also a member of the Production and Operations Management Society (POMS). Dr. Freeman is an active researcher with interests that include healthcare operations management, supply chain risk management, and applied analytics. He has several publications in journals including Manufacturing & Service Operations Management (MSOM), Production & Operations Management (POMS), Omega, the European Journal of Operational Research (EJOR), and INFORMS Journal on Applied Analytics (formerly Interfaces), and IISE Transactions (formerly IIE Transactions).

Journalists are often tasked with making complicated information accessible to a wide audience. Given mere minutes or inches to communicate information that might have taken a researcher pages to explain. Financial data can be particularly tricky to translate as it can require not only a comfort level with numbers but also some understanding of financial markets or economic principles. Reporting on financial information is the focus of this episode of Stats+Stories with guest Alan Smith.

Alan Smith (@theboysmithy) leads the Finanical Times' newsroom team of data reporters and visual journalists. A data visualisation specialist, his TEDx talk Why You Should Love Statistics was featured on TED.com in 2017. Alan is the author of How Charts Work, a handbook on designing with data using the Finanical Times' principles. He is also Honorary Professor of Practice at UCL's Social Data Institute. Before he joined the Finanical Times', he was head of digital content at the UK Office for National Statistics where he was awarded an OBE in 2011 for services to official statistics.