Episode 12: Actuaries in Data Science with Genevieve Hayes
“I think a good starting point would be to learn some basic programming skills. So I've worked with actuaries who are doing a lot of their work in Excel, and that's fine. But if you're going to go into the data science side of things, the first thing you need to do is be able to program.
So just start by doing even just a free online course on how to program in Python. And that's not going to make you a data scientist, but it's at least giving you a taste of what's involved with programming. And then start trying to use those skills to create some projects.”
Dr Genevieve Hayes,
Data Scientist
Dr Genevieve Hayes is the Director of Genevieve Hayes Consulting, an AI and analytics consultancy focussed on helping organisations maximise the value of their data. She has experience in technical, leadership and academic roles, through which she has applied cutting-edge statistical and machine learning techniques to a range of business problems, including image and text classification, social network analysis and psychometric assessment design. Genevieve is a Fellow of the Institute of Actuaries of Australia, and holds a PhD in Statistics from the Australian National University and a Masters in Computer Science from the Georgia Institute of Technology.
In this interview I asked Genevieve about:
The range of “habitats” that data scientists occupy,
The differences between how data science is applied in academia compared with the business world and what this means for teachers,
The skills actuaries need in order to be effective data scientists.
