Today I'm at Newcastle University in the UK talking with statistics professor Chris Oates.

We'll start by talking about his childhood and a doorbell with a difference before following his career path and talking about his current research.

I was born in Milton Keynes.

Milton Keynes. What an exciting place that is.

Well, indeed. But that was just the closest hospital. I really grew up in Northamptonshire.

Northamptonshire, which is where my wife is from. So it's a place close to my heart.

Was that lovely? Were you in like a chocolate box village?

It's certainly in the countryside. It's a rural area between davenry, rugby, Northampton.

These are the major towns. But yes, small villages, just a few thousand people.

Okay. And what were you like as a boy? Oh gosh. Well, I don't think I was, you know, the sort of outgoing type, you know, quite quiet, quite interested in, in sort of constructive, creative hobbies. Like what? What sort of stuff would you do? I think when I was young, I'd be into, you know, sort of Lego and this kind of thing. I mean, my son's still into Lego. This is a universally exciting thing to do, right? But as I got a bit older, I'd be interested in things like electronics and, you know, soldering little circuits and this kind of hobby. It was always appealing to me. What sort of, can you tell me any of your favorite projects? Do you remember any? Like, did you build, like, or remote control car or what was your, what was your marquee project? Well, I don't know how impressive

you're going to find this, but I remember building a little doorbell for my bedroom. So I, you know,

I got the little parts to build the circuit and I put in a little housing. I drilled some holes for buttons and I secure this to my door.

And I must have been quite young at the time.

But this was very exciting for me.

Like, did people then have to ring that to come into your bedroom?

No, no, no.

I certainly wasn't holding people accountable to using the doorbell.

But I really did love the idea of designing a project

and then creating it and then seeing it through to the end. I got a lot of satisfaction from

these sorts of things. You're like a stats guy now. Were you into stats as a kid? Would you

like cricket statistics or football statistics or other statistics? Did you have notebooks full of numbers and things like that?

No, I don't think I can say I was aware of statistics at all until I ended up studying as a university.

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