Events & Calendars Bonnie Ray, IBM T.J. Watson Research Center

As one of the largest IT companies in the world, IBM has been at the forefront of systems, software, and physical and mathematical sciences research for many decades. However, only in the last ten years has it begun to systematically apply advanced statistics and optimization capabilities to support its internal business decision making. In this talk, I’ll provide examples of how the Business Analytics and Math Sciences organization within IBM Research has partnered with other IBM divisions to enable data-driven business transformation. For one example, that of predicting performance of new business initiatives, I’ll discuss two different statistical approaches investigated, Regression Trees and Nearest Neighbors with Metric Learning, and discuss their performance from both a technical and a business perspective. I’ll also highlight some open problems with potential for future research.