Our Foster Children speaker was RDCEP's own Lenny Smith. Smith serves as the Director of the Centre for the Analysis of Time Series (CATS) at the London School of Economics. Smith received his bachelor’s degree from the University of Florida and PhD in Physics from Columbia University.

His talk concerned models, and how we can use modern modeling for almost anything, and that these models can be very accurate. The problem, Lenny says, is that we cannot make models to predict the factors for which we are unaware of - and that is where the challenge lies.