New TED Talk on the 'power and perils of algorithms'

INFORMS member Gah-Yi Ban has recently published a TEDx Talk on “The power and perils of algorithms” in which she discusses the role of algorithms in our lives and how we can shape their role in the future.

This talk also discusses the essential truths about algorithms – helpful information for anyone with or without an analytics background in this Digital Age. Professor Ban said she put in a lot of effort and received a lot of help to ensure this talk can be understood and appreciated by general audiences. She shares the basics of algorithms and their history, and disputes the argument that algorithms are evil with examples of how algorithms have positively helped humans.

Gah-Yi Ban is a professor of management science and operations at London Business School. Her research is in big data analytics, particularly algorithmic decision-making with complex, high-dimensional and highly uncertain data. She has given numerous talks at universities and conferences around the world and this is her first TED Talk. She is a member of INFORMS, the World Economic Forum’s Expert Network, and has worked with various companies from technology start-ups to financial services. Prof. Ban has published in several INFORMS journals including Operations Research, Management Science and Manufacturing & Service Operations Management. Her working paper, “Personalized Dynamic Pricing with Machine Learning: High Dimensional Features and Heterogeneous Elasticity” (co-authored with Prof. Bora Keskin of Duke University) earned her an Honorable Mention in the 2018 INFORMS JFIG Paper Competition.