Heng Xu, co-director of the Robust Analytics Lab, will deliver one of the four AU Ed Talks in this year’s All American Weekend. Her talk, “Data in the Everyday”, will visit the common myths and misconceptions about analytics in the Big Data era, telling real-world stories about the pitfalls in designing, performing, and interpreting data analytics in business practices.

Time: 11am – 12pm, Saturday, October 20, 2018
Location: Mary Graydon Center, First Floor, Rooms 3-4

Abstract

There is little question that we are living in the Big Data era. Countless business decisions, policy discussions, even legal instruments are shaped by the outcomes of data analytics everyday. While we cherish the advent of data analytics technologies and their great potential of turning data into insights and then into actions, we must also understand the challenges and caveats facing the robustness and reliability of data analytics. In this talk, I will visit some common myths and misconceptions about analytics in the Big Data era. Highlighting the importance of these issues in business practices, I will present several real-world stories about the pitfalls in designing, performing, and interpreting data analytics. At the end of the talk, I will briefly discuss the ongoing research to address these challenges in my research group at AU, which aims to make data analytics a robust and integral part of future endeavors in business research and practices.