Plane tune
Concept: this project explores a novel sonification technique that combines: Parametric Path - A 2D curve defined as a function of time t, producing coor...
Posts by Year
2025
Financial audit dashboards
Each year, VAGO tables reports in Parliament summarizing the results of financial audits for various sectors, including local government and education. These...
Auditor-General’s Report on the Annual Financial Report of the State of Victoria: 2024–25
A member of my team contributed by developing the dashboard that accompanies the Annual Financial Report analysis. The dashboard has two complementary secti...
Snooker scoreboard
A problem with being a snooker spectator is keeping track of whether a player has enough of a lead to have won the frame. You need to calulate the difference...
Accessibility of Tram Services: Follow-up
Two members of my team collaborated on the follow-up audit by updating and extending the original analysis with new data and a refreshed interactive dashboar...
Planned Surgery in Victoria
A member of my team contributed to this audit by extracting and standardising data from the Elective Surgery Information System and hospital submissions, ena...
Work-related Violence in Government Schools
A member of my team analysed the department’s eduSafe Plus incident-recording system across a ten-year period, cleaning and standardising the data to make it...
Domestic Building Insurance
A data scientist on my team contributed to this report by carrying out descriptive analysis and process flow mapping of the dispute resolution processes. An ...
Quality of Victoria’s Critical Data Assets
This audit was prompted by observations made during previous audits regarding the quality of agency data. The audit focused on compliance with the Victorian ...
Managing Disruptions Affecting Victoria’s Public Transport Network
This as an example of the one that got away. The analyst that worked on this audit carefully planned the analysis, went through all the effort of carrying ou...
Recycling Resources from Waste
The main contribution I made to this engagement was the development of interactive visualizations embedded within the audit report. This approach hoped to en...
Major Projects Performance Reporting
The Victorian Auditor‑General’s Office’s Major Projects Performance Reporting review presents attested data from 113 major public-sector projects (with total...
2024
Staff Wellbeing in Fire Rescue Victoria
In this performance audit, we looked at how Fire Rescue Victoria (FRV) supports the wellbeing of its staff, including mental health initiatives and workplace...
Fair Presentation of Service Delivery Performance
This Power BI report allows parliament and the public to explore the performance metrics published in Victoria’s annual Budget Paper 3 which presents the sam...
Access to Emergency Healthcare
The Department of Health publishes performance data on emergency healthcare services, but it is not disaggregated by demographic factors. The Data Science te...
Effectiveness of the Tutor Learning Initiative
The TLI provides small-group tutoring (2–5 students) to support those whose learning has been disrupted or fallen behind in literacy and numeracy. Members of...
Literacy and Numeracy Achievement Outcomes for Victorian Students
Members of my team analysed longitudinal NAPLAN data to understand how literacy and numeracy outcomes have changed over time for different groups of Victoria...
2023
Contractors and Consultants
For this engagement, I created an interactive dashboard that allows users to explore Victorian public service spending on contractors and consultants from 20...
Employee Health and Wellbeing in Victorian Public Hospitals
A data scientist on my team analysed WorkSafe claims, survey data, and hospital workforce records to assess how well psychosocial risks were managed in Victo...
Cybersecurity: Cloud Computing Products
This is a great example of how data scientists can add value to an engagement without directly carrying out data analysis. As part of the planing phase of th...
Regulating Private Pool and Spa Safety
The data science contribution to this audit focused on designing a council survey that would generate clear, audit-relevant insights. We adopted a reverse-en...
2022
Kinship Care and Quality of Child Protection Data
We analysed the Department of Families, Fairness and Housing’s (DFFH) compliance with child wellbeing regulations by running metrics across its child protect...
So you wanna data science? Permalink
A write-up of my LinkedIn article on the skills needed to get into data science. It is a summary of the skills I look for when hiring data scientists, and th...
Managing Body-Worn Cameras
I was involved in the design (but not execution) of this piece of analytics that involved fuzzy-joining datasets (police activity and camera metadata), stati...
Government Advertising
This report included a dashboard that allowed the public to explore the publicly reported data on government advertising. The report was tabled by the Victo...
Effectiveness of the Navigator Program
The data analytics in this audit used longitudinal student attendance and academic performance data to measure the effectiveness of the Navigator program usi...
2021
Reducing the Harm Caused by Gambling
Preliminary analysis of the effectiveness of gambling support programs as a demonstration of what the agency could be doing with the rich data they are colle...
Interview on the Auditing with Data podcast
I recently had the pleasure of being interviewed by Conor McGarrity and Yusuf Moolla from Risk Insights on the Auditing with Data podcast. We discussed the u...
2020
Sexual Harassment in Local Government
This audit involved a survey of staff experience of sexual harassment in local government. It was designed to be comparable to the Victorian Public Service P...
Hex my map up
So I got all inspired by some of the US election data viz, in particular some of the mapping of states as abstract shapes with areas proportional to the numb...
Accessibility of Tram Services
This audit includes an interactive dashboard that allows the public to explore and understand the accessibility of Melbourne’s tram network. It allows users ...
Reducing Bushfire Risks
This audit used subject matter data expertise to explore and understand the limitations of bushfire risk modelling undertaken by the Department of Environmen...
Alien information display
I was watching an episode of Star Trek and some of the alien signage displayed in the background reminded me of the album art on Exai by Autechre. I read som...
Tesseract exploration
An animated projection of a tesseract (a 4D generalizaion of a cube). The idea is that by playing with this and observing the shape as it moves, you might be...
Data Science in Performance Audit
Not (see below) presented at IMPACT 2020 with Xiaoyan Lu (Australian National Audit Office).
Safety on Victoria’s Roads - Regional Road Barriers
In this audit, we used Poisson modelling to evaluate the extent to which regional road barriers reduced fatalities and serious injuries. It was based on two ...
2019
Council Libraries
In this audit, we used data envelopment analysis to investigate the efficiencies of council libraries. The inputs included library FTE and collection size, a...
Bootstrap for finite populations
I find bootstrapping to be one of the most general and useful statistical techniques in my toolbox. In the paper below, the method is extended to finite popu...
Commando python envs
Just a quick note on my approach to environments for data analytics (without undies). Here I’m using Python, Jupyter, and Conda, but the approach could be ad...
Portfolio of work with Australia Post
Australia Post is a huge and hugely complicated organisation. They have amazing data (variety, volume, velocity, …) and to be honest, I was still getting my ...
Diophantine footy 2: generalised footy
BTW, this is a follow up to diophantine footy … read that first for context.
Diophantine footy
Last weekend, while watching my son’s footy team (GO BEARS!), my dad noticed that the Bears’ score, 7-7-49, had an unusual property, the score (calculated as...
2018
Grabbing Australian public holiday data from data.gov.au
data.gov.au maintains data on Australian Public holidays, but needs some massaging to get it into usable format. I wrote a cheap-and-nasty Python script for ...
Check out my Tumblr feed Permalink
I was using Tumblr to post some of my more mathematical and physics-related content, but I have since moved that content to this blog. You can still check ou...
Enhanced AFL ladder
At the time of publication, Essendon are clearly the best side in the AFL. (Perhaps I am displaying a tiny little bit of bias here.) They are the best side f...
Gotcha: SQL ‘between’ predicate
Just a quick note of gotcha that I have fallen into a couple of times. (We are in the SAP HANA dialect of SQL here.) This gotcha is caused by two interacting...