Second SRAP-Sydney Research Bites this year, while still in Covid-19 scenario, was a great success online. As an entrée to the coming 2020 SRAP Forum, SRAP in collaboration with Instituto Cervantes brought together last 20th August two experts in Big Data to tell us about the work they are currently undertaking and their views about Data Democratization.
Raquel Romero, Director of Instituto Cervantes Sydney presented the event through a video as she has recently moved to her new position in Brazil.
Oscar Perez-Concha, member of SRAP and lecturer at the Centre for Big Data Research in Health (UNSW Sydney), explained the topic and introduced the two speakers whose expertise in different fields, health and energy, together with different backgrounds, research and industry, gave us a broad perspective of the topic.
Claire Vadjic, Head of the Cancer Epidemiology Research Unit at the Centre for Big Data Research in Health (UNSW Sydney), spoke about her work and her vision to integrate health ‘big data’ to develop interventions that prevent cancer and the avoidable consequences of it. Accessing to anonymised data on behaviour for more than 350,000 Australians linked to cancer and death records, her team has found that figures of the future burden of cancer can be reduced significantly by changing behaviours like smoking, drinking, diet and exercise.
Oscar Omegna, co-Founder of Zawee (Empower Analytics, SavvyBI and SolarBI), works in industry supporting large enterprises, energy retailers and generation project evaluate risk, technology and return of investment by modelling the Australian Energy Market. Oscar pointed in the same direction that Claire did, highlighting the missed opportunities due to the complex, lengthy, inefficient and costly approvals process.
After the presentations the event finalised with an interesting round of Q&A conducted by Oscar Perez-Concha.
Many thanks to all attended the event and to Miriam Garcia of the Instituto Cervantes for organising it.
The video of the Research Bites is available on Youtube