Mar/Apr 2018

Analytics: The more things change…

• Peter Horner

Just when I thought that artificial intelligence and machine learning were the latest, hottest, highest-flying topics in the analytics orbit (January/February Inside Story), along comes a shooting star called “customer success management,” or simply CSM to those in the know. “The CSM field is exploding,” Vijay Mehrotra schooled me in an email. “There are headhunters dedicated to placing CSMs!”

People-based marketing ushers in new era of revenue

• Ryan Urban

Imagine this: A massive group of 30-something, middle-class men from lower Manhattan descend on a Target to make a purchase together. The mental picture is ridiculous, even comical. So why are marketers treating their consumers like just another part of a stereotypical audience with the same hopes, dreams and, well, desire to make purchases?

Customer success management

• Vijay Mehrotra

More than a decade ago, I worked at an enterprise software company whose scheduling product was based on a novel and proprietary machine learning algorithm. Though I had fallen into this role as a result of my background in modeling and optimization, I quickly received an education in how the world of enterprise software worked back in those days.

How A.I. and blockchain can curb rising healthcare costs

• Rajib Ghosh

The new year began with a surge in enrollment at Health Insurance Exchanges despite the Trump administration’s decision to cut by 90 percent funding of advertising for Obamacare and shortening the enrollment period to six weeks. In addition, Congress passed a tax reform bill at the very end of 2017, which included the removal of the tax penalty for individuals who chose not to buy health insurance.

Pro bono analytics, essential skills class, strategy science origins

When Wes Chaar, José Antonio Carabajal, CAP, and Peter Williams from Turner Broadcasting won the 2017 Caterpillar and INFORMS Analytics Society Innovative Applications in Analytics Award (IAAA) for their application entitled “Audience Targeting Solutions Powered by Advanced Analytics,” they knew that they wanted to do some good with their $2,000 in prize money.

Threats and fake news, medical analysis gaps, study on deploying A.I.

Can publicly available data from large-scale social media networks be used to help predict catastrophic events within the country’s infrastructure, such as threats to national security, the energy system or even the economy?

Get down to business analytics in Baltimore

• Jack Kloeber

Considering attending the 2018 INFORMS Conference on Business Analytics & Operations Research?

INFORMS International Conference set for Taipei on June 17-20

• Jessica Bennett

The 2018 INFORMS International Conference will be held in Taipei, Taiwan, on June 17-20. The theme of the conference is “A Better World through O.R., Analytics and A.I.” The conference will showcase advancing trends in deep learning and their impact on business and society.

March/April 2018

Frontline Systems, developer of the Solver in Microsoft Excel, recently released Analytic Solver V2018, its full product line of predictive and prescriptive analytics tools that work in Microsoft Excel. The new release includes a visual editor for multi-stage “data science workflows” (also called “pipelines”) that may include data sampling, transformations, partitioning, training and evaluating machine learning models, and scoring new data.

Medicaid spending

• Harrison Schramm

I have recently been connected to people who were interested in how U.S. states spend their money on Medicaid. Medicaid is a state and federally funded program that is administered by the states in accordance with U.S. federal guidelines, and as such is an important – and expensive – program for the well-being of citizens. Medicaid is a small part of the healthcare ecosystem and a rapidly growing part of the operations research (O.R.) and analytics practice.