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03/08/2019 10:26 AM Posted by: SDP

DAAG 2019 Highlights

If you missed DAAG 2019, we are delighted to share that almost all of the sessions were recorded and are now online at decisionpros.tv. We invite you to watch the videos and give a thumbs up on Youtube to the ones you like. You can also click here for the full program and links to all talks. 

Highlights from DAAG 2019

Dr. Cassie Kozyrkov, the Chief Decision Scientist at Google brought to center stage the importance of the decision-making lens in Data Science and AI. She strongly recommends that people include decision skills in their data science teams. If you haven’t already, we invite you to share her keynote video with your colleagues, data science teams and definitely on your LinkedIn feed.

Dr. Thomas Seyller, Head of Pricing at Google Cloud shared in his fireside chat how his Decision Analysis background gives him a unique perspective as he takes on the complex problem of pricing Google’s Cloud offerings. If you are in a business that deals with pricing decisions, this conversation will offer much to think about.

Stanford School of Medicine epistemologist Prof. Stephen Goodman demonstrated how clinicians commonly misuse p-tests and misrepresent uncertainty and explained how Bayesian statistics can help clinicians’ communicate confidence in their conclusions. If you are in the life sciences, we invite you to share this with your science teams doing clinical research and offer to partner with them to bring the probabilistic and value foundations of Decision Analysis into the mathematics of clinical trials.

If you have ever dealt with the attribution problem around "Prove that your work is what created value,” Dr. Warner North dug into the very heart of causality and explained how a Decision Analysis frame is much more productive in such contexts. We invite you to share this conversation with folks in causality contexts, for instance, those in Marketing who use causal incrementality analysis to deal with the attribution problem.

Dr. Tom Keelin shared his invention - a new probability distribution that can fit data! You can fit 10,000 points out of a machine learning model to let humans make intuitive sense of what the machine is finding. You can also fit 3 points to codify the intuition of a human expert as an input into a broader decision-making system. If you have Machine Learning teams in your organization, this is an opening for you to make a meaningful contribution with Decision Analysis.

A highlight at this DAAG were two special awards. SDP jointly sponsors the Decision Analysis Practice Award with the Decision Analysis Society of INFORMS. This year, the award went to a team that tackled the supply chain of malaria rapid diagnostic kits with Decision Analysis. Dr. Gilberto Montibeller received the award and shared the research with us. In a hallway conversation, Dr. Montibeller shared deep thoughts on validity that formed the foundation of his own research. You will want to ask him about how values are a "constructed reality,” and as such, have a constructivist validity over descriptive or normative validities.

The Raiffa-Howard Award for Organizational Decision Quality (ODQ) was presented for the first time since 2016, to China Mobile. They became the fourth organization worldwide to win the award, and the first organization from China. The previous three winners have been Chevron (2015), Pfizer (2016) and Lilly (2016). Dr. Wang Hongmei, GM of the Department of Development Strategy, received the award and shared with us how much Decision Analysis has shaped the culture at China Mobile. China Mobile is one of the top three telecom companies in China and Dr. Hongmei credits this to their culture of ODQ. This should blow some wind in your sails if you have been evangelizing ODQ — our impact is now global!

These are just a few callouts. We had a lot of goodness generated where it was on the Data+Decisions day, in the deep dives in Energy, Life Science and Hi-Tech, the Community tracks or in the Hallway chats, all on decisionpros.tv. We invite you to amplify whatever you are inspired by on your LinkedIn feed. We also invite you to identify parts of a video that you find worth snipping out as shorter videos to be shared on our YouTube channel.

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