Can you predict the future? Ria Persad Carlo can; at least the future weather. Her company StatWeather has analyzed 120 years of weather data with proprietary computer models and statistical theory and can predict with impressive accuracy the probability. Predicting the weather is critical for businesses like hedge funds, energy traders, agribusiness and utilities, where a rainy day, heat wave or hurricane can spell disaster. Ria and StatWeather are literally saving the day!
Join us as Ria shares her path to success from humble beginnings as a child immigrating to the U.S. to becoming a world-class scientist, mathematician and entrepreneur. Ria was born in Trinidad and Tobago and moved to the United States as a small child. She is an entrepreneur, mathematician and a classical musician. She was profiled by the Oprah Magazine, O highlighting her life as a pianist who at the age of 6 heard the sound of a piano for the first time and then decided to teach herself to play by ear and was considering life as a concert pianist at age 11 but made the decision instead to follow her other passion, science.
It didn’t take long for Ria to convert her skills to the scientific realm and by the age of 12 she was conducting research under a mentor at California Institute of Technology’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Asteroid Discovery. One year later she became a research assistant at the High-temperature Superconductivity Lab at Boston University and by age 14 she had developed new methods of numerical integration, including the "Method of Polygonal Partitions", "Vector Approximation Method", and "Inversion Method" and her garnered her the 1st Award for 2 years in a row at the M.I.T. State Science Fair.
Ria went on to take mathematics coursework at Harvard and at the age of 16 she graduated valedictorian of the Class of 1991 at Boston Latin School. She was then recruited by Princeton University working as a research assistant on the Hubble Telescope. She went on to hone her skills in math and physics at the University of Cambridge and subsequently entered the Ph.D. mathematics program at Rice University but opted to take on a role at NASA as Martian Meteoroid Analyst during the Mars Pathfinder Mission rather than completing the program.
In 2009 Ria made the decision to apply her knowledge to provide more accurate weather prediction systems for the risk management industry. She applied the research and methods that she had been refining since 1991 launched StatWeather. By combining Bayesian neural networks and artificial intelligence to automated forecasting systems.
StatWeather received the Newcomer of the Year Award from Platts and Energy Risk and ranked them as a top global provider in Weather Data Management and Forbes magazine reported that StatWeather "has managed to double the accuracy of weather forecasts” in their article on the future of innovation.
