Insights for Business Executives and Optimization, AI and Advanced Analytics Practitioners
Insights for Business Executives and Optimization, AI and Advanced Analytics Practitioners
A few years ago, I served on an INFORMS committee responsible for reviewing the questions that appear on the INFORMS Certified Analytics Practitioner exam. An interesting challenge for INFORMS is to take an item bank of questions, and choose a subset of the questions to appear on the exam that meet certain conditions related to […]
For time-sensitive Big Data research, renting processing capacity is often better than buying and maintaining farms of dedicated computers, and it helps organizations achieve tremendous leaps in productivity and ease of use. Leaders of a High Frequency Trading (HFT) hedge fund retained Princeton Consultants to create a state-of-the-art environment for researching and simulating their alpha […]
More Operations Research professors and students are building and deploying applications than they were two years ago, aligning them more with advanced analytics practitioners, according to our survey at the INFORMS Annual Meeting October 22-25 in Houston. The survey repeated with minor modifications our survey in 2015 at the same event, which found notable gaps […]
We are proud that our colleague Irv Lustig received the INFORMS 2017 Volunteer Service Award for Distinguished Service. Irv has recently helped develop and improve programs and outreach to businesses and professional practitioners, a critical initiative for INFORMS. Irv points out how, since he began his career 30 years ago, the landscape for Operations Research […]
Photo – The Wagner Prize presentation team: (left to right) Ted Gifford, Daniel Vanden Brink, Tracy Opicka, Robert Randall and Ashesh Sinha. I was proud to be part of a recent project that delivered significant, quantifiable economic savings as well as improvements in productivity and service. The project duration and Time to Payback (TTP) were […]
Princeton Consultants has implemented software systems embedding mathematical optimization for many years. We recently documented our methodology to verify that the implementation is satisfactory. We term this the Princeton Optimization Implementation Verification Methodology (POIVM). Through this cyclical 4-phase methodology, diagrammed below, we verify the robustness and reliability of optimization-based software systems, while enabling ongoing improvements […]
Optimization is a powerful approach to driving up the value yield from a scarce and expensive asset. Space is another asset that can be as scarce as equipment and no less contentious: shelf space, space in shipping containers and freight cars, seats in auditoriums and arenas, and space in magazines and newspapers. Take ad space. […]
For successful implementation, it is critical to understand how data feeds the optimization system. There are two sources of data. The first is automatic feeds. I have been involved in building systems where one database is feeding another database, which is feeding another database, and eventually it feeds the model that you have. What happens […]
Optimizers look for opportunities, even as resources become more constrained. Rather than asking, “How can we reduce costs?” optimizers attack a business challenge by taking a long, hard look at each step of an operation and asking, “What is the best way of doing this? How can we add value by getting more from the […]
As another school year begins, I thought it worth revisiting the snapshot survey Princeton Consultants conducted at the INFORMS Annual Meeting in Philadelphia in 2015. We asked advanced analytics professors, students and practitioners about tools and approaches. The survey was designed to compare the responses of these three groups about optimization solvers and modeling languages, […]
