Professor Adrian Gepp presenting at the Royal Statistical Society (RSS) 2023 Conference in Harrogate

Having three research papers accepted at this very prestigious conference, his research collaborators will be presenting two of these: the health analytics project titled Automated coding of suicidal ideation in emergency department presentations: balancing interpretability and performance, and the finance project titled The Quest for Optimal Trade Execution: Statistical Models vs Reinforcement Learning. Adrian will also be presenting his sole-authored paper Successes, failures and lessons learned from developing Data Analytics programs within Business Schools in multiple countries, one of which won a national award. This presentation will draw on this extensive experience in researching and teaching data analytics, spanning application domains from fraud, finance and advertising through to tourism, sport and operational risk and other predictive analytics for business.

According to Prof Gepp, the “demand for business data analysts is outstripping supply. However, one industry report states that less than one third of analytics projects result in actionable insights.” He believes that “university education in data analytics can play a big role in improving this concerning figure,” and that “university programs should balance teaching technical data analytics proficiencies, developing business acumen and the ability to apply analytics in a real-world setting.” Adrian’s talk will also contain reflective comments on flipped classrooms, interactive online material, short large-scale micro-credentials on external/internal platforms, popular software and consultancy-style capstones and published case studies. In early 2023, we at Bangor Business School recently launched a MSc in business data analytics with a BSc to follow later in 2023 that contains an embedded industry project using real-world data. Prior to leading the development of Bangor Business School’s cutting-edge, researched-informed programs in business data analytics, Adrian led a team at his previous institution to an Australian Award for University Teaching (AAUT) Citation for Outstanding Contributions to Student Learning. The citation read “For designing data analytics programs that foster authentic learning experiences focussed on solving industry problems to produce graduates with technical proficiency and practical business acumen.” Employer feedback included, “I have consistently found that their data analytics programs have created job-ready and commercially savvy graduates.”