The 2022 INFORMS Business Analytics Conference

For the first time, I attended the Business Analytics conference of INFORMS that was held in Houston (TX) on April 3-5 this year. It offered a good mix of practitioners and academics. Many attendees are coming to this conference on a regular basis, and this is their primary/home conference of the year. Many grew in this community and built their career by connecting to those who learn from peers and share what they learned. It’s a strong community where we can exchange ideas and refuel for the next year. Here is an overview of what I took from the conference, well for me, beside meeting some of my closest colleagues at Kinaxis for the first time in real-life!?

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ML and OR, hand in hand??

Legacy methods and approaches can be slow or leave money on the table, so it is critical to choose the right math for the right problem at the right time. Supply chains increasingly face combinatorial challenges, but hybridizing AI/ML and OR can provide a more powerful approach, drawing on the strengths of multiple methods. Anne Robinson (Chief Strategy Office, Kinaxis, and past president of INFORMS) spoke about the use of combined ML and OR methods in solving large-scale supply chain problems . She highlighted the fact that we both need agility in responding to disruptions, and high-quality decisions (intelligence). Each without the other falls short in saving multi million Dollars in the supply chain operations of international manufacturing companies. Supply chains must respond quickly to maintain a competitive advantage, so combining these approaches can provide intelligent agility?

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Create a data-centric culture, embrace analytics.??

Several experts spoke about the importance of creating a data-centric and analytics-based decision-making culture, inline with the famous HBR article by Tom Davenport that shed the light on how to create competitive advantage using analytics. Talithia Williams (Harvey Mudd College and host of NOVA Wonders) discussed the necessity of the cultural shift in organizations to mindfully collect and evaluate data, and to use it as a valuable source and driver of operational excellence.?

Adrienne Palermo (Senior Director, P&G) highlighted the outcomes of such analytics culture that resulted in sustainable volume and sales growth together with 5% annual cost and cash savings across P&G business units. She explained how they implement new digital technologies to solve complex supply chain problems.??

On a closely related topic, Christopher Frazier (CEO, BlockScience Labs) spoke about executive scientist that has a good balance of judgement and data/decision analysis. Hiring and educating this type of profile will result in better outputs from analytical teams.?

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Fighting COVID-19 pandemic.??

Great to learn that many different teams across the globe employed ML/OR/analytics methods to help with many different complex decisions with huge impact in our lives during the pandemic including detecting spread patterns and allocating scarce resources.??

The government of Chile, the winner of the 2022 Franz Edelman Award , used analytics in many ways to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic. Testing capacity, infrastructure (such as ICU) allocation, lockdown planning, public awareness about the virus spread heatmap, and serology surveillance among others. The national strategy led to 29,000 fewer infections and 1,000 fewer deaths. This was not possible without partnering with many teams across academia and healthcare system.

Janssen Pharmaceutical Companies of Johnson & Johnson), one of the finalists at the 2022 Franz Edelman Award , in collaboration with MIT developed an ML model to predict the spread of COVID-19 even months in advance. This accurate model helped with properly locating phase 3 clinical sites in high-risk areas.?

Vishal Gupta (USC Marshall School of Business) presented the joint work with the Greek government in developing COVID-19 prediction models for the country’s gates of entries and optimizing the allocation decisions for the limited available testing infrastructure and resources based on those predictions. His team, including Kimon Drakopoulos (USC Marshall School of Business) and Hamsa Bastani (Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania), were awarded the prestigious Daniel H. Wagner Prize for Excellence in the Practice of Advanced Analytics and Operations Research .?

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Analytics against human trafficking.?

Kendra Taylor (CEO, KEYfficiencies) spoke about how businesses are using technology to end human trafficking and the outcomes of applying analytics in removing social media content that is inappropriate and eliminating associated accounts. Examples included Apple, Meta, and Forced Labor Risk Determination and Mitigation (FRDM). What an impactful use of analytics!?

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Your previous forecast models contain valuable information.?

Miguel Anjos (Chair of OR, University of Edinburgh) spoke about a method he jointly developed with ExPretio Technologies to improve the rail passenger demand forecast models that became obsolete after the pandemic hit because of the change in the consumer behavior. One key point is that the output (forecast values) of the previous models can be used as another source of input data to build new forecast models. A significant advantage of this strategy is that it eliminates the requirement for time-consuming calibration of new models when developing predictive models from scratch.??

In addition, Natalia Summerville (Senior Manager, SAS) gave an interesting talk about tuning predictive models for forecast accuracy , and Chi Zhang (Senior Data Scientist, DoorDash) spoke about ETA prediction post COVID-19 .?

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Advanced analytics and intelligence for product design and management.?

Somik Raha (Product Decision Intelligence Lead, Apple) spoke about how Apple is bringing intuition and rigor together in the context of product management . The team from General Motors (GM), one of the finalists at the 2022 Franz Edelman Award , the Super Bowl of OR and business analytics, presented the Vehicle Content Optimization (VCO), a simulation-based decision support system that helps customers to choose and optimize their vehicle content portfolio improving both GM’s business performance and customers’ satisfaction.?

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Analytics for better selection process

Matthew Brady (CEO, Volley Solutions) talked about examples of leading companies using structured decision science techniques, and how individuals, teams, and organizations can be empowered in making better decisions. An interesting example was in combining advanced analytics and behavioral science to enhance analytic hierarchy process (AHP) method in the hiring and in general selection processes.?

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Choose your manager?

Polly Mitchell-Guthrie (VP of Industry Outreach and Thought Leadership, Kinaxis) spoke and led the discussions on women in OR/MS . We are in the 21st century and still we have to work to prepare a proper work environment for women. Glad that many men joined the discussion. One great takeaway from this session was the quote by Polly: “choose your manager”!?

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INFORMS Business Analytics is not limited to USA?

We can’t say INFORMS BA is an only US conference. Eindhoven University of Technology was awarded the 2022 INFORMS UPS George D. Smith Prize for its Master of Industrial and Applied Mathematics program. The importance of this achievement will be more highlighted if we know other finalists: Rotman School of Management, and Purdue University.?

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And more!?

There was absolutely no shortage of talks on interesting applications of ML/OR/analytics! Just to name a few among many, Ranjit Kumble (VP Enterprise Data Science and Advanced Analytics, Pfizer) spoke about fairness and explainability in developing and deployment of AI models , Heather Johnston (Manager Data Science and AI, IBM Marketing) gave a talk on ML opportunities in B2B marketing , Lili Zhang (Research Engineer, HP) presented HP’s work on customer partitioning for cross-selling products , Moshe Rosenwein (Director Data Science and Analytics, Bayer Healthcare) spoke about allocation of scarce promotion resources among competing brands , and Will Bishop (Data Scientist, Amazon) and Pratik Mital (Research Science Manager, Amazon) presented their work on detecting anomaly in automated buying systems . ?

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Looking forward to meeting you at the 2022 INFROMS International/CORS conference in Vancouver, BC (Jun 5-8), and at the 2022 INFORMS Annual Meeting in Indianapolis, IN (Oct 16-19).?

Image credit: INFORMS and Pixabay