We recently learned of the passing of John D.C. Little, whose foundational work in operations research and decision science set the stage for how organizations harness data for strategic decision-making. His extraordinary legacy dating back to the 1950s includes a…
Thanks to our partnership with Gurobi, we are participating in OSDC East. Our talk, entitled "Unlocking Hidden Value: Data Science + Optimization" follows a theme we have discussed previously. Many business opportunities do not end with data science. In many…
As a firm which focuses on moving beyond data science to optimization, we recognize that there is a distinction between what is mathematically optimal and what is business optimal. As we enter into what is predicted to be the busiest…
First Analytics recently joined the Gurobi Alliance as a service partner. Gurobi produces the world’s fastest and most powerful mathematical optimization solver – the Gurobi Optimizer – which is used by leading global companies across more than 40 different industries…
With supply chain issues topping recent news, the railroad industry is under scrutiny for how well they operate their networks. As a follow-up to our previous post about railroad industry operating ratio, we here consider how analytics and machine learning…
There has never been a more challenging time for the trucking industry. From driver retention and recruiting, to safety, maintenance, and fuel savings, leading companies are now beginning to use a data analytics approach to improve their operations and financial…
Much attention has been heaped upon the data science profession for about a decade now, including by our own chairman, Tom Davenport, who called it "the sexiest job of the 21st Century". Well-known hierarchies of types of analytics generally show…
Goodhart's Law says that, "any observed statistical regularity will tend to collapse once pressure is placed upon it for control purposes." A generalized way of saying it is, "when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good…
An article in the Economist warns that, "a cabal of AI-enhanced price-bots might plausibly hatch a method of colluding that even their handlers could not understand, let alone be held responsible for." The article describes a situation in Martha's Vineyard…