Harnessing Open Data for Business Advantage

Keith, who has unique experience in using demographic and geographic information to support decision-making in both public services and commercial companies, continues to run the Group.

On receiving an MSc at Reading University, Keith started his career as a statistician in 1972 in the Population Studies Section of the Greater London Council. Whilst at LAMSAC and MVA Systematica he managed the SASPAC 1981 census analysis software (which won the British Computer Society Social Benefit Award) and data products including the ED-LINE 1991 census digital boundaries (which won the Association for Geographical Information Industry Award). He also worked for the American market analysis company CACI for two spells, firstly setting up its Public Services Group, and latterly as Director of its Financial Services Group. 
Keith then went independent, setting up Demographic Decisions in 1996 to provide impartial consultancy advice to users of demographic data, and has carried out many projects for both commercial and public service clients. In addition to the DUG and Demographic Decisions day jobs, Keith is an active member of several professional organisations, author of many papers and articles, and a frequent speaker at conferences. He has also been appointed Honorary Professor at the Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis, University College London, and in 2014 was awarded an MBE for "Services to UK Business".

Jane has over 13 years experience working as a methodologist and statistician at the Office for National Statistics. With an Msci in Mathematics and Statistics and MSc in Official Statistics her areas of expertise include small area estimation, statistical disclosure control and protecting the confidentiality of statistics, population and migration statistics and use of administrative data for statistical purposes. 
Jane has established and is currently leading the ONS Big Data team, which aims to understand the impact of big data and data science on UK official statistics and position ONS to take advantage of future opportunities.

Graham Smith is an Associate Director at CACI, and manages the Data Services technical team as part of the company’s “Data Lab”; a team of statisticians and analysts who are responsible for creating, developing and maintaining CACI’s data products. These include Acorn, our geodemographic classification, the Ocean lifestyle database, and many other supporting datasets such as population estimates and projections and small area consumer expenditure estimates.
Graham graduated from Bristol University with a Geography degree in 1993, before undertaking a Masters in Geographical Information Systems at Leeds University.

This then took him on to a position with Business Geographics, a London-based GIS company, where he worked on a wide range of location planning projects, including working with Camelot to develop and support their lottery network optimisation and site selection programme.
Following this, he spent several years working as Modelling Services Manager at GeoBusiness Solutions (later MapInfo), before moving to CACI five years ago to take up the Data Services role.

Graham sits on the New Product Development board at CACI.

Suzy Moat is an Associate Professor of Behavioural Science at Warwick Business School, where she co-directs the Data Science Lab. Her research investigates whether data on our usage of the Internet, from sources such as Google, Wikipedia and Flickr, can help us measure and even predict human behaviour in the real world. Moat’s work touches on problems as diverse as linking online behaviour to stock market moves (with Preis, Curme, Stanley, et al.), estimating crowd sizes (with Botta and Preis) and evaluating whether the beauty of the environment we live in might affect our health (with Seresinhe and Preis). The results of her research have been featured by television, radio and press worldwide, by outlets such as CNN, BBC, The Guardian, Wall Street Journal, New Scientist and Wired.
Moat studied Computer Science at UCL, where she was awarded the Faculty of Engineering Medal, and received a PhD in Psychology from the University of Edinburgh. Since 2011, Moat has secured £3.3 million of funding from UK, EU and US research agencies. With her collaborator and Data Science Lab co-director Tobias Preis, she recently led an online course on using big data to measure and predict human behaviour which attracted over 15,000 learners. Suzy has also acted as an advisor to government and public bodies on the predictive capabilities of big data.

Andy Teague is leading the Beyond 2021 Project in the Census Transformation Programme at the Office for National Statistics in the UK on continued research into the potential of using administrative data and surveys for replacing the ten yearly census beyond 2021. Andy led the statistical research into admin data in the previous Beyond 2011 programme culminating in a suite of research evidence in some 30 published research papers. This supported the National Statistician’s recommendation in 2014 that the next Census in 2021 should be predominantly online but be supplemented by greater use of administrative data and surveys partly as a springboard to the future beyond 2021.
Andy has spent his entire career in the Government Statistical Service initially working on housing statistics and then for over 14 years on two population Censuses. He was lead statistician for outputs from the 1991 Census including delivering a novel new product - the samples of Anonymised Records. In 1994, he took up a Statistician role on the lead up to the 2001 Census eventually becoming on promotion, Head of the Statistical Development team and Census Deputy Director. He led the major statistical innovation in Census taking in the UK, and implemented in the 2001 Census – the implementation of a new process, and world-first, to estimate and adjust for Census undernumeration.
After the 2001 Census, he moved on to assume lead responsibility for the development of administrative data. This included the collection of data for the new Neighbourhood Statistics Service and website. This role also included the development of data sharing for ONS, articulating the case for data sharing clauses in the UK Statistical and Registration Service Bill, which was later passed into law. He subsequently led the process to make use of these new powers to obtain (for ONS) access to data to support population statistics and the Census.

Having a long standing interest in Census and population statistics and their modernisation, coupled with his background in administrative data, his current role provided the next natural career move for Andy.

Ben Smith is an experienced mobile data scientist. With over 15 years’ background analysing big data, Ben spent 13 years at Tesco holding a number of analytical roles culminating as the head of online location planning. Ben has worked with Telefonica since 2013, supporting a number of key clients in the Retail, Insurance, Outdoor Media and Banking sectors using the Macro level o2 data. Ben has also worked on the development and roll out of the Small Cell product which delivers micro level location specific insights for anonymised o2 users. This has proved particularly useful for projects such as retail banking store optimisation and visitor attraction customer analytics. 
In his spare time Ben enjoys playing golf and tennis and taking his young daughters to watch Watford FC. Truely outnumbered at home, as well as is family, Ben lives with 78 female stick insects, Linda the cat and 2 dwarf Russian lady hamsters.

Ben Anderson is a member of the Sustainable Energy Research Group, Faculty of Engineering & Environment (Energy & Climate Change), University of Southampton