As September marks the start of the NFL regular season, this month's episode explores how data science and AI are used in professional football to make the sport more entertaining, competitive, and safe. How has the way data is used to enhance the game advanced? What is the most underutilized piece of data that could offer teams a significant advantage? How do teams balance human instinct with AI-driven analysis when making decisions in games? For aspiring sports analysts, what technical or soft skills and experiences are most important to develop? Listen to our fascinating discussion as we delve into the intersection of sports analytics and data science.

Our guest:

• Michael Lopez, Senior Director of Football Data and Analytics at the National Football League (NFL).

In July 2024, we witnessed one of the most significant internet disruptions in history when CrowdStrike released a faulty update to its security servers. This update impacted approximately 8.5 million systems, triggering outages across various sectors, including airlines, banks, stock markets, and even government emergency services. Even once activity was restored, threat actors sought to take advantage of the situation through phishing schemes and other cyberattacks. Though caused by an internal error rather than malicious intent, incidents like CrowdStrike’s outage underscore the growing importance of reliable security measures on technologies that impact daily life. On this month’s podcast, we explore the ins and outs of cybersecurity, how cyberattacks occur, and what steps you can take to protect your data.

Our guests:

• Milena Rodban, independent geopolitical risk consultant and former senior advisor at the National Risk Management Center at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA).
• Arun Seelagan, Senior Data Scientist at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA)

To celebrate HDSR’s 5th anniversary last month we hosted Vine to Mind, a symposium centered around wine and data science that featured leading experts from around the globe representing research and industry. The talks were so engaging that we decided to share some of the celebration with you at home. Today, we are joined by two of the esteemed symposium speakers, Laura Catena and Ahmed Tawakol, who help us explore the health benefits and potential drawbacks of wine. We also discuss how alcohol-related research is conducted and learn about the future of wine research. For all of this and more, stay tuned for this latest episode of the Harvard Data Science Review Podcast!

Our guests:

• Laura Catena, Managing Director of Bodega Catena Zapata, and Founder of Catena Institute of Wine.
• Ahmed Tawakol, Director of Nuclear Cardiology and Co-Director of the Cardiovascular Imaging Research Center at Massachusetts General Hospital, and Associate Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School.