Udo Sglavo is Vice President of Analytics R&D at analytics powerhouse SAS, where he is passionate about shaping the vision and directing the implementation of some of the world's most powerful analytical techniques. SAS has been applying analytics to complex business problems for decades, and in his role Udo has the privilege of leading a team of highly skilled individuals responsible for building and testing the SAS analytical ecosystem.

He received a diploma in mathematics from the University of Applied Sciences, Darmstadt, Germany and is a proud holder of several patents in the area of advance analytics.

He formed part of the team responsible for editing the original volume of Business Forecasting: Practical Problems and Solutions and the new volume, Business Forecasting: The Emerging Role of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning, will be released in Spring 2021.

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Transcript

Hadley: [00:00:00] Udo. Welcome to the show, dude. 

[00:00:04] Udo: [00:00:04] How are you doing?

[00:00:05] Hadley: [00:00:05] All right, mate. Doing all right. And, uh, yeah, looking forward to just finding out more about Udo. I'm really looking forward to this interview, dude. 

[00:00:14] Udo: [00:00:14] Hey Hadley. First of all, thank you so much for having me. I'm really looking forward to our discussion.

[00:00:19] That should be a lot of fun. 

[00:00:21] Hadley: [00:00:21] Okay, cool. So, uh, to kick things off I normally ask my guests, what does curiosity mean to you? 

[00:00:29] Udo: [00:00:29] Well, Hadley, that's already a, an awesome question because, uh, I, I truly believe that we live and, uh, in the century of curiosity really, we do, but what does it mean to me? I think curiosity is the first stage for creativity and what I mean by that is, you know, in order to be creative in order to.

[00:00:55] You know, solve problems, which we may have never seen before or problems, which we are aware of, but we just didn't have the means to solve them previously. You know, we need a lot of creativity in our day and age, but typically it's curiosity, which points you in the direction of these problems, you know, it's like, well, why is this happening?

[00:01:20] Why is this a problem in the first place? You know, or, you know, why haven't we talked about this previously? So I frankly wouldn't label mySCLf as a very curious person. I really don't try, but, you know, I think when I sink my teeth into something, right, I get really curious. Right. You know, so what I mean by that Hadley is, um, you know, I'm not the type of person who is kind of driving

[00:01:50] or is curious about many different things. Right. You know, like today I'm curious about that. And tomorrow I'm curious about this, you know, I think I'm more narrow in my focus to be frank

[00:02:02] Hadley: [00:02:02] understood and I do get that. And I think, um, I'm kind of the same as that. It's not that I want to know a little bit about everything, but it's when something piques my curiosity, then, you know, that's when kind of this, this, uh, process kicks in and then you want to find out more.

[00:02:20] And as I've said before, you know, I, I find that curiosity is an enabler to discovery and a discovery of SCLf. So you start to understand a bit more about what you like and what you are interested in. And then obviously also discovery of the topic itSCLf, because normally there's so many different layers.

[00:02:38] Udo: [00:02:39] I like that. I...