Google, P&G and MapR headline UC’s 2018 Data Science Symposium

The Center for Business Analytics at the University of Cincinnati’s Carl H. Lindner College of Business hosted its annual Data Science Symposium on Oct. 12 at Lindner Hall on the University of Cincinnati’s Main Campus.

The half-day event, now in its seventh year, featured three keynote speakers from Google, Procter & Gamble and MapR Technologies, as well as a panel discussion where audience members had the opportunity to ask the speakers questions relating to topics in data science.

Supporting a long-term strategy of becoming a nationally recognized program in business analytics and information systems, the technically oriented event drew more than 220 participants from Cincinnati and surrounding regions, including business professionals from companies such as Procter & Gamble, Macy’s, Kroger and Netjets as well as Lindner College of Business students and faculty.

The first speaker, Michael Thompson, a research fellow at Procter & Gamble, discussed how common modeling techniques represent decision problems in his presentation, “Bayesian Sense-Making in Data Science.” Thompson illustrated how Bayesian analysis complements other techniques and also presented several examples of Bayesian sense-making.

John Bossert, a senior data scientist from Google, spoke about “Two Problems in Demand Planning for Compute Resources at Google” where he gave an overview of the organizational structures of data science and the Operations Decision Support Group at Google. He considered two optimization-based analyses within demand planning for compute resources.

Joe Blue, director of Global Data Science at MapR Technologies, talked about “Zen and the Art of Model Maintenance” and how accuracy of real-world decisions made by machine learning solutions may degrade over time. He described that decisions about adjusting the models are made without recent performance data and also discussed solutions to overcome the lag time before the model performance can be assessed.

The Data Science Symposium is one of two annual analytics events presented by the UC Center for Business Analytics. The next event, the 2019 Analytics Summit, taking place on April 1-3, 2019 at the Sharonville Convention Center, will feature two days of analytics training followed by a conference day with three top-notch keynote speakers and five applied analytics tracks. Registration for this three-day event will open January 2019.  For futher information about these events, visit the Center for Business Analytics website.

The Center for Business Analytics at the University of Cincinnati’s Carl H. Lindner College of Business is a corporate-academic partnership that promotes the use of data-driven analytical methods. The center serves its members and the Greater Cincinnati community through leadership development opportunities, hosting three annual analytics events and professional analytics training using recognized experts, connecting business organizations to Lindner’s Business Analytics and Information Systems graduate students for research and projects, and managing analytics consulting projects using faculty and university resources. UC’s Center for Business Analytics is here to serve local and national organizations with their analytics needs and to help them excel in this high-demand industry.

At the Carl H. Lindner College of Business, we are committed to developing the next generation of business leaders. Through personalized career coaching and experiential learning, our students graduate with a competitive advantage in the workforce and are strongly positioned to address a multitude of today’s global business challenges. For more than 110 years, we’ve not only served as a catalyst for innovation and cutting-edge research, but our programs have also earned national acclaim in several academic areas. The best is yet to come in 2019, as we celebrate the grand opening of our new state-of-the-art building that promises to firmly position Lindner as one of the best business schools in the nation. We are Cincinnati’s extraordinary college of business.