Profile

My name is Sophie and I live in Surrey with my family, and rescue cat (called Jess because she looks like Postman Pat’s cat)  I grew up with a love of Lego, puzzles and aeroplanes.  I even started work as an aeronautical engineer before I found out about Bayesian Networks and completely changed the course of my career by completing a part time PhD whilst I worked.  I really love swimming (particularly wild swimming in the summer), puzzle books and walking in the South Downs near to where I live.  I can play the trombone and double bass and as I’m a coeliac am pretty proud of my ability to make gluten free Yorkshire puddings.  All there is left to know is that I prefer coffee over tea, pears over apples and my favourite flower is the tulip.  I also like talking about maths whenever I can including about algorithms  https://listenvypod.com/g/dr-sophie-carr/and about Bayes theoremhttps://kpknudson.com/my-favorite-theorem/2019/11/13/episode-48-sophie-carr

I work mainly in statistics and probability on lots of different types of problems from working out breeding strategies for dogs (which was done using probability trees) http://ifors.org/newsletter/ifors-dec-2014.pdf  (scroll down to Dachshunds And Data) through to working out what food is brought together in supermarkets https://www.baysconsulting.co.uk/portfolio-items/weather-response-model/ to working out where an ocean front is when an underwater glider is moving and supporting flight trials for unmanned drones https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9PNG5PT-Jls in Helsinki.  A lot of my work is about developing both predictive models – that is understanding what we think will happen in different circumstances as well as analysing data we have to understand what is happening now.

I own a small data science company which employs myself, Sam and Abbie.  We don’t have a company office and are located across the UK but get together whenever we can to talk about our work (we talk each week on Skype but it’s always good to get talk face to face)  I also work in the office in my house

My work involves computer modelling, usually writing in R or Python generally to develop algorithms that use statistics to analyse data sets.  There are two main areas: understanding what the data is showing and this can be done through looking at ratios, distributions, assessing an hypothesis but often starts with simple summary statistics such as box and whisker plots, the mean, range and visualisations of the data.  The second type is trying to predict what will happens either in the future using both AI techniques such as random forests as well as more traditional techniques you learn at school such as plotting a line of best fit.  One of the areas I’m working on that’s really great is predicting where shellfish come from so we can try to help stop illegal fishing https://ima.org.uk/7170/how-marine-biology-maths-and-chemistry-can-help-sustainable-fishing/

What’s great is that most of my work is with with other companies and that means being a mathematician is really a team type of job.