Data And AI for Leaders

Get under the skin of data and AI technologies, models and more. With guidance from Alan Turing Institute fellows Julia Handl and Richard Allmendinger, explore how these technologies can transform organisations and provide a foundation for making more deliberate business decisions.

By challenging yourself to think critically and conceptually, begin building towards a high-level of data literacy. Learn to weigh technologies and their potential impact and discover a confidence in numbers you didn’t realise existed.

Course topics

Whichever industry you work in, data and AI literacy is fast becoming a fundamental and sought-after skill, and it’s increasingly important for decision-makers to have the ability to integrate this knowledge into the strategic choices they make.

Develop the skills needed to make impactful, data-driven decisions within your business, and build your conceptual understanding of AI and how it can be applied within your organisation.

This practical four-day course will touch on three main themes – the different tools available to analyse and derive predictions, the transparency of models and understanding human bias in data models.

Day one: 

• Understand the importance of visual analytics and storytelling

• Explore the uses and misuses of statistics

• Interact with pre-designed data visualisations, AI models and dashboards

• Discover the principles of unsupervised learning and cluster analysis

• Explore Alliance Manchester Business School’s Data Visualisation Observatory 

Day two:

• An introduction to supervised and deep learning in practice

• Understand the difference between Classification vs Regression

• Critically evaluate and compare pre-designed models to assess predictions and interpretability

Day three: 

• Explore reinforcement learning and optimisation

• Understand simulation, including modelling of uncertainty

• An introduction to fairness and model boundaries

Day four: 

• Explore multi-criterion decision-making within group settings

• Understand the difference between augmentation vs automation of decision making

• Deliver a presentation critically analysing a data set of your choice and discuss at least one AI application with the data

There will be a networking drinks reception on evening one?where you will get to know your course colleagues. There will also be a course dinner on evening three, in an iconic Manchester venue, offering the opportunity for your class to come together with a wider cohort of short-course learners to expand your networking opportunities.