Automating Scheduling and Resource Allocation Decisions

Posted on March 20, 2018 by decisionmanagementcommunity

Decision Optimization frequently deals with scheduling and resource allocation problems. One of the best-known software package for modeling and solving scheduling problems was ILOG Scheduler. This month IBM published a very detailed article “20+ years of scheduling with constraints at IBM/ILOG” that describes the latest IBM ILOG CP Optimizer for scheduling. You also may want to learn how to use DMN-like decision tables for “Modeling Decisions for Scheduling and Resource Allocation Problems“.

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Building Stateful Decision Services

Posted on March 19, 2018 by decisionmanagementcommunity

Sometimes a decision service needs to consider information or context from previous invocations of the service. For example, you might want to award a customer discount if they purchased more than two items in one week. The information you keep about each invocation is called the state, and a decision service that uses state in its business logic is stateful. Nigel Crowther, our presenter at DecisionCAMP-2017, wrote an article that discusses three ways you can build stateful decision services with IBM ODM.

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A Path to Common Sense AI?

Posted on March 18, 2018 by decisionmanagementcommunity

Our recent post talks about Paul Allen’s intention to teach computers common sense. This LinkedIn’s post is attempting to define a path for common sense reasoning (click on the image): “For computers to operate at the “common sense” level, they are required to resolve (1) common sense reasoning from logic, (2) logic from available knowledge, (3) knowledge from available information, and (4) information from available data.“

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Decision Management and Semantic Reasoning

Posted on March 16, 2018 by decisionmanagementcommunity

DM+SW“This September DecisionCAMP and RuleML+RR will be co-located again for the third time during the Logic for AI 2018 summit in Luxembourg. These two events represent two different but closely related fields of the knowledge representation movement: Business Rules & Decisions Management and Semantic Reasoning. In this post I want to talk about relationships between these two fields and the events.” You may read the entire article just posted by Jacob Feldman at the RuleML Blog.

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Assessing Cardiovascular Risk Factors with Computer Vision

Posted on March 15, 2018 by decisionmanagementcommunity

Google Brain Team: “Recently, we’ve seen many examples of how deep learning techniques can help to increase the accuracy of diagnoses for medical imaging, especially for diabetic eye disease. In “Prediction of Cardiovascular (CV) Risk Factors from Retinal Fundus Photographs via Deep Learning” we show that in addition to detecting eye disease, images of the eye can very accurately predict other indicators of CV health. This discovery is particularly exciting because it suggests we might discover even more ways to diagnose health issues from retinal images.” Continue reading →

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The Usefulness of Imperfection

Posted on March 13, 2018 by decisionmanagementcommunity

ImperfectToday Tallys Yunes shared his thoughts about Theory versus Practice in creating real-world decision models. A few quotes: “models aren’t perfect, and that’s perfectly OK. There’s a reason why business analytics is known as “the science of better” rather than “the science of provably optimal.” More often than not, it is impossible to capture all nuances of a real-life problem into a mathematical model. Therefore, solutions produced by such a model are to be taken with a grain of salt and cautious optimism.” Continue reading →

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Decision Management Most Influential People

Posted on March 9, 2018 by decisionmanagementcommunity

This year DMCommunity.org will try to determine the most influential people in Decision Management technology in 2018. How will we decide whom to include in the DM Most Influential List? Go to this page and nominate your candidates  to the DM Most Influential List which will be finalized during DecisionCAMP in September.

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bpmNEXT Conference: Santa Barbara, Apr 17-19

Posted on March 7, 2018 by decisionmanagementcommunity

bpmNEXT-2018 is not a typical conference pitching case studies to newbies. bpmNEXT is for those already neck-deep in this technology revolution and keen to know what’s coming next. Not just hear about it, but see it, touch it, and influence it. This year “we’re talking about blockchain and smart contracts, standards-based decision services, Internet of Things, and Robotic Process Automation. It’s about enabling business users with low-code/no-code integration and orchestration tools. And a whole lot more.”

Posted in Blockchain, BPM, DMN, Events, Standards | Leave a comment

INFORMS Business Analytics Conference, Baltimore Apr 15-17

Posted on March 7, 2018 by decisionmanagementcommunity

INFORMS Analytics Conference 2018 will be held on April 15-17 in Baltimore, MD.  It brings together 1,000 leading analytics professionals and industry experts who will hear over 150 talks and perspectives on topics such as Real Time Decision Systems, Managing Risk, Supply Chain/Logistics, Revenue Management and more. See Tracks & Speakers

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Paul Allen Wants to Teach Machines Common Sense

Posted on March 6, 2018 by decisionmanagementcommunity

Microsoft’s co-founder Paul Allen wrote: “These days, I’m disinclined to invest in completely open-ended research. I’ve learned that creativity needs tangible goals and hard choices to have a chance to flourish.” However, last month he announced pumping an additional $125 million into his nonprofit computer research lab for an ambitious new effort to teach machines “common sense.” The money for the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence will about double the lab’s budget over the next three years, helping to fund existing research as well as the new effort, called Project Alexandria. In the years and decades to come, the lab hopes to create a database of fundamental knowledge that humans take for granted but machines have always lacked. Read more

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