First step towards data science collaboration

By Ejaz Hussain – Data Scientist and Anna Trichkine – Data Quality Lead

An exciting learning Journey with LOTI and ONS.

The Data Science and Data Quality Team at London Borough of Hounslow is a newly formed team within Digital and IT. The team is made up of Lead Data Scientist Ejaz Hussain, and Data Quality Lead Anna Trichkine.

As a new team, we will be working to improve data practices and data ethics within London Borough of Hounslow. We will be exploring new opportunities for how to use our data and how to make sure we are making more data-enabled decisions across the borough.

To begin with, we have been selected to join the pilot data science and machine learning programme run collaboratively by ONS and LOTI.

Who are ONS?

The Office for National Statistics, the government department specialising in everything data and statistics!

Who are LOTI?

The London Office for Technology and Innovation, working to support collaboration between 33 London local authorities.

What is the programme?

The programme focuses on developing the team’s expertise in data science, specifically to improve the quality of local government data by using programming languages; R and Python.

This is an 8-12-week programme and we will be meeting with the ONS mentors on a weekly basis.

During these weekly sessions, we review data projects together with the mentors along with other local authority participants who have also been selected to join the programme.

A picture of our first session together is shared below.

Zoom call screenshot of first data science programme session

How will this benefit London Borough of Hounslow?

We will be taking the learning from these sessions and sharing the tools and techniques with other analysts across the council.

We have been given access to the ONS learning pool, a hub of well-prepared learning materials, that we can share with staff across the council.

If you are interested in accessing this content or to find out more about our sessions, please email us and we will be happy to guide and support.

Thank you to ONS and LOTI for this exciting opportunity.