How Human-in-the-Loop AI is Like House Hunters
photo of row of townhouses seen through fisheye camera lens

House Hunters International is great guilty-pleasure viewing, especially while nursing a cold or avoiding the plague. (Pro: Insider views of interesting cities. Con: Reminders of the unique pain of choosing a place to live.) It’s easy to add city center, natural light, and extra bedrooms to your wish list, but painful to accept the inevitable […]

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Deciding while distancing: From data viz to the hard decisions.
coronavirus pandemic curve - johns hopkins

This is an anxious time for anyone in policy / decision analysis. Machine learning, analytics, statistical models, and decision intelligence are helping leaders grapple with the coronavirus pandemic, but weighing alternatives and connecting actions → outcomes requires so many things. Once the modeling is complete and the data visualizations are shared, then what? Newly anointed […]

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Redefining data science skill, biased policy decisions, and data strategy.
decision bias in food-poverty policy

1. Biased analysis → Misunderstood cause-effect In Biased Ways We Look at Poverty, Adam Ozimek reviews new evidence suggesting that food deserts aren’t the problem, behavior is. His Modeled Behavior (Forbes) piece asks why the food desert theory got so much play, claiming “I would argue it reflects liberal bias when it comes to understanding […]

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Papers We Love: Judgment Under Uncertainty / Cognitive Bias

Our founder, Tracy Allison Altman, will talk about cognitive bias and behavioral economics for software design @ Papers We Love – Denver. Tversky and Kahneman’s classic “Judgment under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases” challenged conventional thinking about bias in decision making, inspiring new approaches to cognitive science, choice architecture, public policy, and the underlying technology. Join […]

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Data-driven organizations, machine learning for C-Suite, and healthcare success story.
book cover Data-Driven Organization

1. Great stuff on data-driven decision making in a new O’Reilly book by Carl Anderson (@LeapingLlamas), Creating the Data-Driven Organization. Very impressive overview of the many things that need to happen, and best practices for making them happen. Runs the gamut from getting & analyzing the data, to creating the right culture, to the psychology […]

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Open innovation, the value of pharmaceuticals, and liberal-vs-conservative stalemates.

1. Open Innovation can up your game. Open Innovation → Better Evidence. Scientists with an agricultural company tell a fascinating story about open innovation success. Improving Analytics Capabilities Through Crowdsourcing (Sloan Review) describes a years-long effort to tap into expertise outside the organization. Over eight years, Syngenta used open-innovation platforms to develop a dozen data-analytics […]

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