Speakers

Dr Safaa   Amer
Professor, George Washington University

Biography:

Dr. Safaa Amer is a Professor at George Washington University. She has extensive experience in international survey research, statistical analysis, impact evaluation, sampling, missing data, geographic information systems, data sciences, and visualization. Her areas of interest are capacity building and applications within the social sciences in developing countries to contribute to the well-being of those populations and support decision-making. She has developed innovative sampling methods to reduce cost and increase precision in the field using GIS technology. Her work covers development support across several countries in Africa, Asia, and South America

"International Statistics - The Kitchen & Market!"
The need for robust statistics to support decision-making has been increasing in developing countries. In spite of large-scale data collection efforts across projects from governmental institutions, donors, local and international organizations, we still suffer from a wide range of data challenges, which reduce the reliability and validity of the statistics, shared with decision makers and with the public. For example, some of these challenges are data quality, inconsistencies across data sources, lack of metadata, outdated data, miss-used data, etc. I will be covering some of these challenges and proposed solutions covering administrative records, survey data, big data from social media and other sources.

"Deming and the meaning of quality"
Deming’s advice is rich and varied across management and statistics. In this talk, we will start with some background about Deming and Scheuren as two of the leaders who shared the passion of quality and statistics. This introduction will be followed by an overview of Deming’s 14 quality points leading to the Theory of Profound Knowledge(ToPK). As we discuss the ToPK, the focus will be on the knowledge of variance as a driver of quantitative research in general and statistics in specific. Finally, we will shed some light on the initiative within the Library of Alexandria including this conference and future activities as a living example of Deming’s framework in action.