The Federal Election has been run and won, with the Australian Labor Party emerging victorious and Anthony Albanese appointed Australia's 31st Prime Minister.

Prior to the Election, the YDAWG traversed into the ‘Twittersphere’ to take in what the candidates, parties and the public have been saying, and have applied a machine learning algorithm to mimic the candidates’ tweets.

Read the YDAWG's analysis.

How can we predict building claims costs in Small Medium Enterprises across Australia using advanced statistical machine learning techniques? Or group and price hundreds of different industries based on data and business knowledge?

Commercial insurers are searching for solutions to these ongoing industry challenges, as well as young talents to contribute to their solutions. Dr Fei Huang describes the UNSW Business School’s Sandbox Project, which aims to do just that. 

Find out more.

In the wizarding world of Harry Potter, we see people who have passed away living in moving portraits, acting and speaking just like they did when they were alive. What once seemed like the most fantasised imagination is now becoming a reality in the ‘muggle’ (non-magical) world through deadbots. These are natural language models trained to imitate the speech of people after their death.

This article discusses the range of ethical issues that arise from this application of artificial intelligence, such as the rights a person has after their death.

Read the full article here. 

It takes bravery, poise and commitment to make the jump from the relative comforts of full time employment to establishing a startup – especially in the rapidly evolving data analytics space. Sam Zheng, tech entrepreneur, data scientist and actuary, has taken these challenges in his stride.

Sam joins Meg Yang on the 'Driven by Data' Podcast to delve into his experience from setting up not one, but two artificial intelligence startups, how his actuarial skillset has helped him adapt to the innovative entrepreneurial world, and his essential tips for getting into the space.

Listen to the podcast.

Have you ever analysed a CSV file with far too many rows with your work-assigned laptop, and found yourself waiting (and waiting) until a dreaded 'out of memory' error appears?

DuckDB is a free open source SQL package compatible with both Python and R, and here, the author uses it with Python to query 1.5 billion records faster than Pandas and without running out of memory.

DuckDB also recently introduced additional syntax features that address some of the weaknesses of SQL. For R users the article referenced an earlier blog post that has both R and Python code.

Explore DuckDB.

Join data science legends Colin Priest (Global Lead, AI Governance for DataRobot) and Jacky Ng (Data Science Lead at Swiss Re's Advanced Analytics Centre of Expertise) as they unpack the complexities of artificial intelligence and data analytics.

In this webinar, Colin and Jacky will illustrate the concept of fairness assessment through a predictive underwriting use case for life insurance, and also briefly touch on the insurability of mental illness and whether it is fair to exclude from insurance cover.

Time: 12:00-2:00pm AEST
Date: Thursday 9 June 2022
Registration: $30 for Institute Members, $40 for non-Members

Register now.