A platform devoted to risk in all its numerical forms.
About
Oh, why hello! My name is Omar Swei, and welcome to RiskByNumbers!
First, a little bit about myself. Outside of RiskByNumbers, I am an Associate Professor of Civil Engineering at The University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. I've long considered myself a 'methods' person, interested in the ways that probability, statistics, optimization, and other available methods can support decision making. This interest likely stems from the fact that, to this day, I am terrible at making decisions on the fly.
By far the most rewarding aspect of my job is working with students, helping them learn about new ways of solving difficult problems. This brings me to the impetus for this platform.
Prior to 2020, the majority of my educational experiences as a student and teacher had been in a traditional classroom environment. When our university shifted to online teaching in 2020 due to COVID, however, I genuinely saw a need to pivot my approach to teaching to meet student needs. So, in response, I completely altered my teaching techniques. I built out a lightboard studio in my bedroom and, in 8 months, developed nearly 250 short videos for my students. Class time was devoted towards problem solving and playing around with scripts that I developed to really understand the theory underlying different methods. The results were clear to me: students were learning more and performing better on their assessments.
So, why did I create RiskByNumbers? First off, I received many requests from past students to share my past recordings publicly so that they could reference them in the future. The thought of sharing them widely, however, has been 'scary'. The videos are a bit rough, and, in fact, if you watch them in chronological order, the bags under my eyes become increasingly more visible. Having said that, I strongly believe in making education accessible and engaging to as many people as possible. As data play an increasingly important role in our every day lives, I really see a need for content that is accessible to any and all levels around probability, statistics, and other quantitative methods. And, so, in the fall of 2023 I mustered up the courage to start up this platform.
If you have made it this far down the page, thank you. Thank you for your interest in this initiative, and I hope that the content on this platform is helpful to you. I'll slowly create new videos while using this blog to provide faster, written explanations of key topics.
If you are interested in reaching out to (1) provide feedback on future videos of blog posts; (2) discuss the ways my consulting services can help you; or (3) explore possible collaboration opportunities, then feel free to fill out the below contact form.
