On 20 April 2023, the inaugural lecture of Professor Christophe Ley gathered almost 150 persons on Belval campus. His students, colleagues, partners, friends and family were present for this solemn and festive moment. On this occasion, Christophe shared his work and passion about statistics.
The event was introduced by Prof. Jean-Marc Schlenker who was very pleased to welcome so many participants and was honoured to present Prof. Christophe Ley who joined the University of Luxembourg as professor in applied statistics in November 2021. However, this was not the first time that the University welcomed Christophe as he took part in the first promotion of the Bachelor in Mathematics in 2003.
Christophe Ley started his lecture by presenting himself as an applied mathematician working in the field of statistics, with a strong taste for interdisciplinary work. Before joining the University of Luxembourg, he was Associate Professor at Ghent University in Belgium. He is President of the Luxembourg Statistical Society and the European organization for Advanced Courses in Statistics (ECAS), and Leader of the international network S-TRAINING, linking sports analytics and sports medicine.
Then, he presented in a very clear and understandable way key concepts such as data science, statistics, and machine learning. “Data is the new oil. As Tim O’Reilly used to say: Who has the data has the power, but I would like to nuance it. Nowadays, we are surrounded by tons of data therefore it is even more important to keep a reality on what data means. I would rephrase the citation: “Who understands the data has a serious advantage”, explains Prof. Ley.
He illustrated his point by presenting some examples of real applications. “For instance, to predict the number of goals scored by each team during a football match, it is useful to find predictors such as the mean age of players, collect data from previous matches and define an algorithm to link the predictors to the result of each match”, comments Christophe.
He finally presented his research team MIDAS (Modelling – Interdisciplinary – Data – Applied Mathematics – Statistics) and main study domains covering space science, protein structure prediction, earthquake analysis, sport predictions, to name a few.
The event concluded with a cocktail party during which the guests had the opportunity to chat and network.