We asked one of our data science Principal Consultants Tom Fowler to talk about our data science capability and the value of data in decision making.

Briefly explain your role at Techmodal and a little about you

My role is to lead the data science capability within Techmodal. I provide team leadership and direction, supporting with hands on delivery of projects and providing expert technical advice to the presales team and on the writing of bids.

I began my career working for the Police, breaking down barriers for information sharing and developing Machine Learning models to support vulnerable people across Bristol. This work was widely recognised and recently profiled in the New York Times. Following that I moved into consulting and have worked across the health, local government and defence sectors. 

What is Data Science?

 When people say ‘Data Science’ it’s sometimes just ‘thrown in’ to conversations as a buzzword used to describe everything from Excel spreadsheets to deep neural networks. Personally, I would define Data Science as using scientific method and structure to extracting useful insight and knowledge from structured and unstructured data by applying statistical analyses. This includes Machine Learning, traditional statistical modelling or more advanced deep learning techniques. It can be applied to structured data held in databases, but increasingly to unstructured data such as text, images, audio and videos as well.

Explain the value data can bring to a business

Organisations are often sitting a vast amount of data that could help them become more efficient and identify risks and opportunities more easily. The most successful businesses of the last decade are those that have capitalised on this data to help them improve internally but also adapt to customer needs. Compare Netflix to Blockbuster or Asos to Debenhams, data is at the heart of every successful business and Data Science allows you to extract the insight from that raw data.

What does the Data Science capability team do at Techmodal?

 As a team, we have experience in exploratory data analysis, machine learning, forecasting, natural language processing and computer vision projects from proof of concept through to delivery. The team is made up of extremely talented data scientists ranging from recent graduates to those with extensive commercial and technical experience. They are all passionate about the value data science can bring and driven to develop technical solutions to business problems.

What exciting data science projects are the team working on?

The team has a huge range of projects on currently, we are working in defence to develop a secure cloud environment in which we analyse everything from satellite imagery to diagnosing faults in aircraft. Others are working to understand the language models used in submarines or supporting the deployment of naval warships around the world. We are also working hard to further develop our internal data science platform with new capabilities and cutting edge tooling ready for the next projects that come our way.