Software to Help Users Think
What does software do for us? Roughly speaking, it fits into two categories: The software industry is pretty good at #1: to build good “doing” software, it’s helpful to think about how people do...
Category: Data, and its limits
An Alternate Formulation for Causal Inference Research
Causal inference is an important and active area of artificial intelligence research today. Indeed, no less than Turing award winner Yoshio Bengio lists causal reasoning as a top priority, as does his co-Turing award...
Guest Post: Connecting Decisions to Data: A Case Study, Part 4: Decision Intelligence and Business Intelligence: How They Differ and Why We Need Both
In this post I discuss how Decision Intelligence differs from the current best practices in decision support epitomized by Business Intelligence solutions. My particular focus will be on why the typical “data-to-dashboard” Business Intelligence...
Guest Post: Connecting Decisions to Data: a Case Study (Part 1)
In my last post I looked at the problems in getting the data to support evidence-based decision making. We get that data through decision modeling, so here I’ll begin a deep dive into Decision...
Guest Post: The Backwards Conversation (part 1 of a series)
Most conversations between decision makers and data professionals begin back-to-front If you’re a decision maker who wants to make the best use of data and other information resources, such as artificial intelligence (AI), to...
Guest Post: Are you a good evidence-based decision maker? Take this quick test to find out.
A lot of organizations are facing new mandates to be more “evidence-based” or “data-driven”. Part of the reason is that there’s a lot more data available than ever before, so why not use it?...
Guest Post: Data-Driven to Win
Is your use of data equipping your organization to be a comfy sedan or a Formula 1™ race car? Data. Whatever you may or may not know about it, it’s a safe bet that...
If AI Doesn’t Work, then How Could it Kill Us?
Forbes reports that “most AI projects fail”; Techrepublic puts the number at 85%. How do we reconcile this reality with claims of AI as representing an “existential threat” such as those from Elon Musk...
Understanding what we mean by “Decision” in ML/AI/DI
In artificial intelligence, machine learning, decision intelligence, statistics, and science, we use the word “decision” to mean a lot of things. Let’s tease out some distinctions: Decision Type Name Question answered Primary information Source...
Big Decisions, Small Data: Eight Key Principles
Conquering the most important problems faced by complex organizations often requires great models, not “big data”: in many situations, better decisions can be made with imperfect or incomplete data. As storage and processing costs...
