What does Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace have to do with Decision Analytics?

Posted on September 15, 2016 by decisionmanagementcommunity

warandpeace“While Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace is a critically acclaimed story of life, love, and loss, for even the most avid bookworms the thought of reading this lengthy tome from start to finish is more of a millstone than a milestone. Indeed, at 1,225 pages (that’s over 587,000 words) it’s a book that many people talk about but very few have actually read or finished.
The big data analytics narrative is similar. While this ground-breaking technology is firing the imagination of Supply Chain and Revenue Management professionals everywhere, most of them seem to be ‘talking the talk’ rather than actually ‘walking the walk’.” Read more at this article written by David Simchi-Levi.

Posted in Business Analytics, Decision Optimization | Leave a comment

The Right To Be Forgotten

Posted on September 13, 2016 by decisionmanagementcommunity

righttobeforgottenYou’ve probably heard about “the right to be forgotten” according to which Google has to delete search results about you, if you ask them to. “According to a new General Data Protection Regulation of the EU, the right to be forgotten means that a data subject (user) can request the deletion of his data from any data controller (which includes web sites), and the data controller must delete the data without delay. Whether it’s a social network profile, items sold in online shops/auctions, location data, properties being offered for sale, even forum comments.” Read more

Posted in Misc | Leave a comment

NEOS Server: State-of-the-Art Optimization Solvers

Posted on September 12, 2016 by decisionmanagementcommunity

optimizationThe NEOS Server (Network-Enabled Optimization System) is a free internet-based service for solving numerical optimization problems. Hosted by the University of Wisconsin in Madison, the NEOS Server provides access to more than 60 state-of-the-art solvers in more than a dozen optimization categories. The NEOS Server offers a variety of interfaces for accessing the solvers, and jobs run on distributed high-performance machines. The NEOS Server is available free of charge for everyone, anywhere in the world.

Posted in Decision Optimization, Products | Leave a comment

Why People Stumble on Aug-2016 Challenge

Posted on September 10, 2016 by decisionmanagementcommunity

On August 1 we published a new challenge unknown“Greeting a Customer with Unknown Data” and until today we haven’t received even one solution. Why? Is it because of August’s vacations? We suspect that this “simple” challenge is much more difficult than it looks like. Many real-world decision models deal with similar problems: they have to produce a meaningful outcome even when expected input is not available.
Will DMN’s recommendation to use “null” for unknown values be sufficient and still business friendly in such situations? We challenge BR&DM vendors and practitioners to provide their solutions. 

Posted in Challenges, Decision Models | 2 Comments

Remember When People Laughed at the ATLAS Robot? WHO’S LAUGHING NOW?!

Posted on September 10, 2016 by decisionmanagementcommunity

atlasrobot“It seems like just yesterday that ATLAS was stumbling over a simulated debris field, and now we see it balancing on one foot on the edge of a thin sheet of plywood. It’s like putting a crawling infant on the ground for a few seconds while you tend to something else, and then turning back to find it asking for your car keys so it can go to the mall, or join the Army.” Think how many decisions it requires to be made. Read and watch the latest robotics progress here.

Posted in Trends | Leave a comment

What is Blockchain? Part 1

Posted on September 3, 2016 by decisionmanagementcommunity

Blockchain technology may revolutionize the world. A decision management expert Dan Selman promises to explain the technology in his blog-posts. The Part 1 provides a simple introduction with a smart contract example:  Continue reading →

Posted in Trends | Leave a comment

Business Processes Are Learning to Hack Themselves

Posted on August 16, 2016 by decisionmanagementcommunity

Automated process change comes in three main flavors: self-adapting, self-repairing, or a combination of the two. Some organizations are already deploying elements of process change automation using machine learning, while others are developing technologies that lay the foundation for it. See examples of companies leading the charge in this Harvard Business Review.

Posted in BPM, Business Analytics | Leave a comment

Explanations for Human-Aware Artificial Intelligence

Posted on August 15, 2016 by decisionmanagementcommunity

Prof. Eugene Freuder will present position papers “Explanations for Human-Aware Constraint Programming (CP)” and “CP and AI” at CP 2016 on Sep 5-9 at Toulouse, France. “A key aspect of human-awareness is the ability of our machines to explain their behavior and their decisions. Accordingly we focus here on explanation in CP for users. The most attention has been paid to programs providing explanations for themselves, to enable them to function more efficiently. There has been work on providing explanations to programmers to facilitate development or debugging. There has even been some work on users providing explanations to programs, to facilitate problem acquisition. “

Posted in Business Analytics, Decision Optimization, Events, Explanations, Trends | 1 Comment

Serverless Architectures

Posted on August 3, 2016 by decisionmanagementcommunity

Serverless architectures refer to applications that significantly depend on third-party services (knows as Backend as a Service or “BaaS”) or on custom code that’s run in ephemeral containers (Function as a Service or “FaaS”), the best known vendor host of which currently is AWS Lambda. By using these ideas, and by moving much behavior to the front end, such architectures remove the need for the traditional ‘always on’ server system sitting behind an application. Read more

Posted in Trends | Leave a comment

Microsoft Helps Users Improve Their Writing

Posted on August 2, 2016 by decisionmanagementcommunity

Microsoft wants to go far beyond the current spelling and grammar capabilities and focus more on what you did wrong in your writing and how it should be fixed. One new feature in MS Word 2016, called “Editor”, will help users improve their writing by suggesting changes, just like a human editor. The feature picks up on issues like wordiness, non-inclusive language, differences in tone, lack of consistency in hyphenation and other areas, jargon, slang, passive voice, clichés, and use of the double negative. Read about this and other new features here.

Posted in Products, Trends | Leave a comment