After defending (and revising) my thesis late last month, I'm back to blogging. This week I was in Orlando for the INFORMS Analytics conference. During the conference they host the Edelman competition with the goal of recognizing a project with huge tangible contributions made possible by OR and analytics.
I made it to three of the six talks, and enjoyed hearing about what people are doing with data.
I made it to three of the six talks, and enjoyed hearing about what people are doing with data.
- The NYPD has developed "DAS" which integrates with department phones and provides real-time information about an address and the surrounding area before police even show up at the scene of an event. They also use the data to identify likely locations for crime to target extra enforcement (it seemed somewhat less sinister than minority report).
- Until very recently, UPS still had their drivers plan their routes each day. ORION changed that with major cost savings. One of the most interesting parts to me was that before they could roll out this project, they needed to collect much more accurate map data to avoid the problem of "Google maps tells me to drive a mile out of the way to make a u-turn."
- 360i is a marketing firm which specializes in paid search advertising. Keyword-based advertising at Google is allocated based on the result of an auction. However, there are literally hundreds of thousands of strings that a particular company might want to bid on. 360i developed a set of tools to improve the effectiveness of search advertising by trying to figure out what people intended to search for (their example was you don't want to waste advertising dollars on someone trying to figure out how to sort out relationship problems)
UPS was chosen as the winner this year, and will be joining an impressive list going back to Pillsbury in 1972.
