Format: Interactive presentation followed by live coding demonstration via Zoom and livestream to YouTube

This interactive workshop has two parts, the first of which introduces the basic concepts of synthetic data, shows examples, and explores why researchers need to be aware of what synthetic data is. This part of the workshop answers questions such as:

• What is synthetic data?
• What types of synthetic data are there?
• To what purposes can synthetic data be put?
• How can synthetic data be generated?

After a short break, the second half of the workshop switches over to jupyter notebook to demonstrate several methods in python for generating synthetic data of various forms. There is time at the end to answer questions or to repeat parts of the demonstration for clarity.

The Zoom workshop is limited to 50 participants but will also be livestreamed to ensure those who could not attend via Zoom can still see the content. All participants and viewers will have access to the slide decks and jupyter notebooks used in the workshop via a GitHub repository and a recording of the workshop will be available on YouTube after the workshop.

Recommended audience: Anyone who is interested in understanding or potentially using synthetic data for research purposes.

Prerequisites: There are no formal prerequisites for attendance, but users will get the most out of the code demonstration if they have:

• Access to a computer with python installed or to an online python environment,
• At least basic python competency (e.g. should know how to load packages, read in data, assign variables, write data out to a .csv, etc.).