Nicole Satherley will present on iNZight Analytics’ social mobility project at two international conferences in May 2026. Abstracts for the project were accepted for presentations at the in Vilnius, Lithuania during 12 – 14th May, and the (of the International Sociological Association) Spring Meeting in Seville, Spain during 20 – 22nd May. The presentations will allow us to discuss initial project findings and the strengths of New Zealand’s national data resources to international experts in social stratification and official statistics. You can read more about the project , or at the link below.
iAL are proud to have hosted another four students over the 2025/2026 summer break, all from the University of Auckland. Gemma Ngari worked to develop a working prototype of a web app to visualise projections of the total population, working age population, and voting age population across a diverse range of Pacific nations. Kasish Prasad's work looked at addressing challenges in classifying Pacific ethnic identity in official statistics. This had a particular focus on how statistics about Indo-Fijian populations is collected in New Zealand, Australia, and other countries, including Fiji. Ken Deng's summer project aimed to improve iNZight software's iNZightRegression package by creating user-friendly tools for verifying model assumptions. Ken developed a comprehensive suite of interactive functions that guide users through checking key regression assumptions, including normality, linearity, multicollinearity and constant variance, combining statistical tests with clear visualisations. Erena Tanabe's project focused on implementing Bayesian parameter estimation to the iNZight software using analytical methods. This included researching appropriate conjugate priors to use for the types of variables and variable combinations seen when exploring and analysing data, and coding methods for these to perform parameter estimation. Supporting talented students is an important part of iAL's commitment to building a future applied statistics and data science workforce, and we're looking forward to seeing where these four take their careers
iNZight's Tom Elliott presented at the eResearch NZ / eRangahau Aotearoa conference, held at Waipapa Taumata Rau | The University of Auckland on February 10-12. eResearch NZ / eRangahau Aotearoa is a collaborative conference series organised by REANNZ and Genomics Aotearoa with the support of the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment (MBIE) and the wider research and science sectors. Tom talked about new open-source tools under development which connect R and web frameworks like ReactJS, enabling the development of stateful web applications that can embed data sovereignty principles as and where needed. For more information about the eResearch NZ / eRangahau Aotearoa conference, follow the link below. Photo credit: 2025 eResearch Conference,
Can you trust a political poll? It's an election year, so political polls will be a common feature in our news feeds. But how reliable are the results, especially as they vary between polls? RadioNZ's afternoon show featured an interview with Dr Nicole Satherley, lead researcher at iNZight Analytics, discussing what we know about political polls. Check out the interview , or at the link below. iNZight Analytics has also published a summary guide to understanding political poll results, along with a more in-depth guide. Both available on This work is part of iNZight Analytics commitment to making data and statistics more accessible to the New Zealand public.
