Keynote: Sir David Spiegelhalter

Should we trust statistics about Covid?

The current pandemic has emphasised the key role that statistics play in understanding what is going on around us.  But how reliable are all these numbers?  How much should we trust what we hear and read?  When do statistics become misinformation?  I will look at the way that statistics can be used to try and persuade audiences to think or act in a certain way, including some utter data disasters, and contrast this with efforts to make communication 'trustworthy'.

Speaker:

Sir David Spiegelhalter

Winton Professor of the Public Understanding of Risk

Statistical Laboratory

University of Cambridge

Moderated by:

Xiao-Li Meng

Editor-in-Chief, Harvard Data Science Review

Whipple V. N. Jones Professor of Statistics

Harvard University