Dr. Alex Antic is the Head of Data Science at the Software Innovation Institute. He has 17+ years of experience across different industries including Federal and State government, Insurance, Asset Management, Banking (Investment and Retail), Consulting and Academia. Alex has recently been recognised as one of the Top 10 Analytics Leaders in Australia by IAPA (Institute of Analytics Professionals of Australia).

He describes the early days of his career as a time for personal growth and honing in his technical skills. Now, his goal is to use data science and artificial intelligence for public good, and as a way to drive impact and change.

Alex is an enthusiast of the experimentation culture; he believes in the fail fast and fail cheap notion and how it is important for organizations to not be scared of failure, given that this can keep them from moving towards innovation.

Quotes:

• "Can’t take out the human element when it comes to analytics. Analytics only gets you so far, you have to think about broader applications."
• "People need to think about what problem they are solving and if it needs to be solved by a complex method."
• "When you are trying to solve a problem, start with the simple solution first, and add complexity as you need to, as sometimes the non sexy elements will add value to the organisation, such as automating an excel file .. You don’t often or always need to go down the complex deep learning algorithm to extract value, as it will make it difficult to explain and difficult to validate, and simplistic is beautiful in many ways."

Read the full episode summary here: Episode #136 Enjoy the show!