IT Professionals New Zealand | Te Pou Hangarau Ngaio

Friday Live Webinar: The data behind Covid-19

View the Friday Live webinar here at 4pm today

Each Friday of Level 4 lockdown ITP will be hosting the brand new ITP Friday Live webinar.

This week's session features a tech news roundup with the TechBlog team, followed by a great talk and Q&A session from former Assistant Reserve Bank Governor Dr John McDermott. He leads the data science team at Wigram Capital Advisors, predicting the level of virus activity and its impact in different scenarios.

Dr McDermott will talk us through how data is being used to make the big decisions, including the data analysis, technology and accuracy, and what the predictions show us. Plus answer your questions during live Q&A.

These Level-4 weeks are long and times are tough. So grab a beer, wine or juice and finish your week off right with this informative and entertaining session, delivered live online nationwide.

4.00pm: TechBlog Panel Chat

The Friday Live webinar will kick off with a chat with ITP's awesome TechBlog team, giving a quick roundup of this week's big stories on TechBlog and elsewhere.

The TechBlog team includes:

• Paul Brislen, TechBlog Editor
• Sarah Putt, TechBlog Contributor
• Peter Griffin, TechBlog Contributor

The team are a "who's who" of tech journalism in New Zealand over many years. They know their stuff and between them have edited or covered tech for many household name publications in NZ.

ITP CEO Paul Matthews will facilitate the session and put your questions to the team.

4.20pm: The data behind Covid-19

Data analysis and advanced prediction tools have become a core feature in combating Covid-19, but what really is the data behind the virus? How is it analysed, what assumptions are made and what technology is used to get meaningful predictions?

Former Assistant Reserve Bank Governor and executive director of the economic think-tank Motu, Dr John McDermott is leading the data science team at Wigram Capital Advisors, predicting the level of virus and its impact in different scenarios.

His team's work is helping with decision making and has been quoted by PM Jacinda Ardern - it was his team that predicted 4000 people would have been infected by last week if we hadn't gone into Level-4 lockdown.

Dr McDermott will join us to talk through how data is being used to make the big decisions, including the data analysis, technology and accuracy, and what the predictions show us. Plus answer your questions during live Q&A.

4.40pm: Q&A with Dr John McDermott

ITP CEO Paul Matthews will put your questions to Dr McDermott - ask him anything about the data behind Covid-19.

5.00pm (ish): Go and enjoy your weekend!

You've earned it.

Connecting in 

We'll be using Zoom's Webinar Edition for this session, so if you haven't used Zoom before we suggest trying to join 5 minutes early to download the software.

We will email the connection details 30-60 minutes prior to the session to those registered, to their registration email address, so please check your email!

The use of Zoom for webinars

We've been watching closely the developments in relation to Zoom and other videoconferencing software.

Having taken advice, we are informed that our use case isn't affected by the issues that have been uncovered to date. For example, our webinars aren't confidential (in fact they're freely available, live), we don't enable chat functions, and none of the other issues affects us at this stage.

While we are concerned and are actively evaluating alternatives, we'll be continuing to use Zoom in the meantime for non-confidential use cases. Those who hold concerns can still access the webinar using the web browser version, or via the ITP Facebook page (albeit without Q&A). 

View the Friday Live webinar here at 4pm today

While the ITP Friday Live webinar is open to anyone in tech, future sessions may be limited to ITP members only.

Please note that this session may be video or audio recorded for viewing by other members at a later date. As it is possible that audience members may be incidentally recorded, please let us know if you specifically want to be excluded and we will ensure you are not shown.