Fix the Semantic Model First: Lessons on Power BI, Snowflake and AI
I just watched Snowflake's Power BI webinar and it mirrors my client work: AI and BI only succeed when the semantic model is right. Daisy-chaining is a trap.
Insights & Ideas
Exploring data analytics, AI trends, and visualization best practices
Semantic Models for AI: The Missing Foundation for Reliable Enterprise GenAI
Why LLMs and AI agents need governed semantic models and metric layers to eliminate hallucinations, enforce business logic, and deliver trustworthy enterprise insights.
The Death of the Prompt Whisperer: Why Context Engineering Is the New AI Operating System
Prompt engineering is fading. Context engineering is becoming the real operating layer for scalable, reliable, and governable AI systems.
Healthcare as the New Frontier for Fine-Tuned AI Models
Why healthcare is emerging as the proving ground for fine-tuned frontier models, and what this shift tells us about the future of personal, on-device AI.
From Prompt Engineering to Context Engineering
Why building effective AI systems now depends less on clever prompts and more on how we design, curate, and manage context.
Data Visualisation Predictions 2026: From Dashboards to Decision Systems
In 2026, data visualisation moves beyond dashboards into AI-assisted decision systems, where agents, semantics, and trust shape how insights are created, shared, and acted upon.
Unlocking the Emotional Power of Data Visualisation and Storytelling
Reflections on my recent World Data Summit virtual roundtable about how data visualisation, storytelling, and AI come together to inform, inspire, and create meaningful impact.
Raising the Bar in Investor Relations Communication
How adopting global investor relations data and communication standards and applying effective data visualisation principles can build trust, transparency, and engagement across financial institutions.
How Do You Turn Data into a Story? A Beginner’s Guide to Narrative Structure
Learn how to transform analysis into compelling data stories using a simple three-act framework — Onset, Development, and Outcome — to help your audience understand, believe, and act.
AI in Data Visualisation
Augmenting Our Ability to Generate Visual Data Narratives. Artificial Intelligence is reshaping the way we approach data storytelling. This presentation explores how AI is diminishing the time needed for context-setting and analysis, making unstructured data more accessible, and elevating prompting as the new must-have skill.
Data Design for Everyone: Making Data Visualisation Truly Accessible
Explore how inclusive design principles can enhance your dashboards and data visualisations for all users—combining accessibility with effective storytelling.
Best Data Visualization Software in 2025
Discover the leading data visualization platforms of 2025, their standout capabilities, and how to select the right tool for your organisation.
The Future of AI in Business Analytics
Exploring how artificial intelligence is transforming the way businesses analyze and interpret data for strategic decision-making.
Data Visualization Best Practices for Business Impact
Learn essential principles for creating compelling data visualizations that drive business decisions and communicate insights effectively.
The Future of Data Visualization: Trends and Technologies
Discover emerging trends in data visualization including AI-powered insights, interactive storytelling, and immersive analytics experiences.
Data Visualization Predictions 2025
Discover emerging AI-driven trends transforming data visualization by 2025.
Tips for Creating Better-Looking PowerBI Dashboards
Create better PowerBI designs and solutions to help you communicate and connect with your audience.
Bad vs Good Data Viz: A Simple Bar Chart Example
Exploring the fine line between clarity and clutter in data visualization for more effective data storytelling.
Reimagining Data Science: The Rise of LLM-Powered Agents
Generative AI transforming data science, analytics, and visualization with LLM-powered agents.
Data-Driven Solutions to Help You Elevate Your Marketing Efforts Today
Elevating marketing with data science: segmentation, recommenders, RFM analysis.
Mastering Data Visualisation and Storytelling: A Guide for Leaders
Enhancing data teams and leaders with design, communication and storytelling techniques.
Elevate Your Data Visualisation and Storytelling Skills
Turn complex ideas and data into stories that resonate with your audience.
A D3.js Bar Chart Race of COVID-19 cases
This is a bar chart race animation of daily COVID19 cases created using D3.js and Observable.
Geocoding Data in Google Sheets
This post shows how easy it can be to geocode data using a custom script with google apps script in Google Sheets.
Creating Fake (Mock) Data with Python
Mocking up data for analytics, datawarehouse or unit test can be challenging. This Python package is a fast and easy way to generate fake (mock) data.
Video Interview: Powering Customer Success with Data Science & Analytics
An interview with Mike Sager, Vice-President of Customer Success of SiteMinder.
Accelerated Computing for Innovation Conference 2018
Highlights from the ACIC18 presented by The Sydney Informatics Hub at the University of Sydney
How to Get Started In Data Science & Analytics
Slides for a talk I gave at Academy Xi on how to get into data science and analytics.
The 4 Core Competencies of the Future-Proof Data Scientist
What are the key capabilities of a successful data science and analytics professional - now and in the future’? What are the things I should learn if I want to become a really good data science and analytics professional?
3 Things I Learned Helping Australia’s Leading Creative Agency Win A Large Analytics Project In Less Than A Week
Three key learnings from a recent analytics project in partnership with The Works, a leading creative agency.
Data Science and Analytics Panel @ Academy Xi: The Age of Big Data
Joining me at Academy Xi are experts from leading organisations who will share their perspectives on all things big data and analytics.
DASAMA™ - Data Science and Analytics Maturity Assessment model
The DASAMA™ model has been developed to help organisations gain visibility on their data science and analytics journey.
sizeR - Helping you decide which size to buy
In this blog post I wanted to build a simple solution to help online shoppers decide on the best size of clothes they should buy while online.
4 Elements That Can Make or Break Your Data Analytics Initiative
While all of these elements are non-data related, I'd argue they can have as much of an impact on your data analytics initiative as issues relating to data quality, choice of analytical tool, time spent fine-tuning algorithms, etc.
Literacy and Numeracy Among Young Australians: NAPLAN 2017 Preliminary Results Dashboard
This is a mobile-friendly interactive dashboard created in Tableau looking at some data from NAPLAN 2017 Preliminary results.
Time Series Forecasting in R with Google Analytics Data
Data that are obtained in series of points over an equally spaced period of time are generally referred to as Time series data.
Temporary Skilled Migration in Australia - A Overview on 457 Visa Holders
This is a mobile-friendly interactive dashboard looking at data for holders of visa subclass 457 over the past 6 years (2010-2016) in Australia.
Calculating Compound Annual Growth Rates (CAGR) in Python
CAGR measures the mean growth rates of money or units / quantities of something over the years. This is a simple function in Python to calculate CAGR.
Introduction to Principal Component Analysis (PCA) in Unsupervised Learning Settings
Principal Component Analysis (PCA) is a popular method used in statistical learning approaches.
Visualisation & Storytelling - Best Practices and Examples in the Context of Data Analytics
This is a bunch of slides I put together for a talk I gave recently on data visualisation and storytelling in the context of analytics.
Quick Guide: Interpreting Simple Linear Model Output in R
Linear regression models are a key part of the family of supervised learning models.
Using R for a Simple K-Means Clustering Exercise
K-Means is a clustering approach that belogs to the class of unsupervised statistical learning methods.
Visualising Growth in Salary vs Donation in Australia over the past 20 years
This is a visualisation created using Plotly.
Intro to Classification Problems: Simple Logistic Regression for Churn Modelling
When we study approaches for predicting qualitative responses, we study classification problems.
Employee Average Weekly Earnings Estimates in Australia - A Tableau Public Viz
This visualisation is a product of the data wrangling work done in a previous post.
Simple Excel Data Wrangling with R
Today we are going to deal with some Microsoft Excel spreadsheet data in R.
Kaggle Otto Group Challenge - An initial Random Forest approach
Thoughts and a simple approach to a Kaggle competition using Random Forest in Parallel
Resampling with the Validation Set Approach - An Example in R
Resampling is a technique that allows us to repeatedly draw samples from a set of observations and to refit a model on each sample in order to obtain additional information.
Multiple Regression Analysis in R - First Steps
In this example we'll extend the concept of linear regression to include multiple predictors.
Simple Linear Regression - An example using R
Linear regression is a type of supervised statistical learning approach that is useful for predicting a quantitative response Y.