The Victorian Branch of the Statistical Society of Australia Inc. (SSAI) is an umbrella group for all statisticians practising in Victoria and Tasmania, and for all non-statisticians with an interest in the field of statistics.
Meetings will be held at The University of Melbourne unless otherwise indicated.
SSAVIC Listserver
A list of members of the Victorian Branch of SSAI has been created on a server at the University of Melbourne. List members can post messages which will be received by all on the list. So, if you need to advertise seminars, workshops, job vacancies, etc., that are relevant to the society's interests, you are welcome to post to the list. The list address is ssavic@puffer.ms.unimelb.edu.au
If you are not a SSAI member and wish to add your name to the list, contact Sue Finch, s.finch@ms.unimelb.edu.au
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Upcoming events
Branch meeting on Tuesday 25 June, 2013
5:45pm – Light refreshments in the Staff Tea Room, Richard Berry Building, The University of Melbourne.
6:15pm – Seminar in Russell Love Theatre, Richard Berry Building, The University of Melbourne.
7:30pm – Dinner with Ben at Café Italia.
Analytical Model Development and Implementation – Experience from the field
Dr Bhavani Raskutti
Pacific Brands
About Bhavani
Dr Bhavani Raskutti has over 20 years of experience in developing and commercialising analytics applications in diverse industries such as manufacturing, retail, banking and telecommunications.
Some of her achievements in her various roles include:
• Successful delivery of data mining capability at Pacific Brands. The capability provides the business timely, data-driven insights for operational and strategic decision-making.
• Significant productivity improvements in predictive modelling for Westpac.
• Successful commercialisation of an internally developed search engine.
• Improvement in marketing and sales effectiveness through the business' adoption of innovative predictive models to improve customer targeting for churn and up-sell.
• Implementation of an automated text based analysis tool to improve customer complaint handling.
Other accolades include winning the global KDD (Knowledge Discovery & Data mining) Cup in 2002, co-founding of Insitex to implement data and text mining for bio-informatics, authoring of four patents and over 40 publications in the field of analytics.
You are invited to join Bhavani for dinner at Café Italia after the meeting.
Slides from speakers are available on the Branch Meetings page.
2012 Belz Lecture
The need for speed
Professor Chris Wild, University of Auckland
How will tomorrow’s statisticians cope with today’s data deluge - the explosion in the quantities of data being collected, the conceptions of what constitutes data and the settings in which it can arise? How will they exploit the advances we are making in data visualisation? It is imperative to find ways to get students much further, much faster and with better comprehension – a quantum leap in ambition. What can make this possible are some of the same things that gave rise to the deluge: computational power and clever software. Our strategies envisage maximising awareness and excitement about data and identifying what matters and what can or should be jettisoned. We provide glimpses of two software projects aimed at enabling such a future.
The Maurice H. Belz Lecture is an annual lecture established by the Statistical Society to honour the work of Professor Belz in establishing and advancing the science of statistics in Australia.
Podcast of the 2012 Belz lecture