Resoundingly Human

It’s Friday night, you’re cooking dinner for your friends or family. The wine is poured, the table is set. You’re preparing a favorite recipe, but have added a brand new spice mix to the dish. It smells amazing, and everyone agrees, it tastes even better. But where did this new seasoning come from? The answer? Artificial Intelligence!

To talk about this fascinating new application of AI, the result of a partnership between IBM and McCormick, I am joined by Robin Lougee, Research Industry Lead with IBM. 

Operations research and analytics play a key role in advancing medical technology and methodology, with improvements to diagnostic testing, both conventional and AI-based tools, helping doctors more easily and accurately identify and treat medical conditions, providing better patient outcomes. 

But what happens if doctors aren’t using these tools, either out of concern over the costs incurred by the patient, or because they hold their own personal diagnostic abilities in higher regard, relying on that over diagnostic testing?

In this episode, I am joined by Tinglong Dai with the Johns Hopkins University Carey Business School and the Johns Hopkins School of Nursing, as well as his coauthor, Shubhranshu Singh also with the Johns Hopkins Carey Business School, as well as the Krieger School of Arts & Sciences. Their research titled, “Conspicuous by its Absence: Diagnostic Expert Testing Under Uncertainty,” in the INFORMS journal Marketing Science, looks at barriers that stand in the way of more consistent adoption of diagnostic tools, including AI, that can aid in a physician’s diagnosis.

It’s a brand new year at INFORMS and we are all looking forward to an incredible 2020, especially as this year marks the 25th anniversary of INFORMS! In this episode, I am joined by the 2020 INFORMS president Pinar Keskinocak, to discuss her goals and objectives over the coming year. 

Healthcare is a complex, often overwhelming subject, and the effort to match patients with providers based on patient needs and provider ability, known as the patient provider alignment (or PPA) problem, has consistently proven difficult to tackle. In the past, this was thought to have been exacerbated by the limited availability of information available to the public regarding providers and their performance, which could help facilitate better patient provider matches. However, despite efforts to increase transparency by making healthcare data open and available to the public, the PPA problem still persists.  In this episode, I am joined by Soroush Saghafian professor with Harvard University, whose research in the INFORMS journal Operations Research, “Can public reporting cure healthcare? The role of quality transparency in improving patient-provider alignment,” takes a deep dive into exploring this issue and offering some potential solutions. 

The video game industry is growing at a phenomenal rate, generating a record $43.4 billion in revenue in 2018, an increase of nearly 20 percent from the year before. The largest area of growth within this industry has been within the online gaming community. But with players functioning at different skill levels and an even wide range of interest areas, how can companies ensure players remain engaged and their products continue to grow in popularity? Joining us for this episode to provide new insight into online gamer behavior is Yan Huang from Carnegie Mellon University, whose research which was recently published in the INFORMS journal Information Systems Research, tackles these questions head on. 

Has this ever happened to you? Walking up to your favorite local restaurant, looking forward to a delicious meal only to discover ... it has failed its restaurant inspection!

Yuck. I think there are few events that will convince you to eat at home more.

But what if there was a way to anticipate if a restaurant was at risk of failing an inspection well before this actually happened? In this episode, we will hear from James Howard, a scientist at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, whose research has helped identify if a restaurant will fail an inspection before it actually happens. 

More than 60 million companies maintain business pages on Facebook, allowing them to connect with existing customers as well as reach new ones. And with more than 1.62 billion people log onto Facebook daily, this might seem like a great way to reach a nearly limitless audience. However, the Facebook platform which enables consumers to provide comments and feedback, provides companies with very little power to control what is posted on their pages, leaving them open to negative feedback which could have a damaging effect on their brands.

To give us insight into the nature of the comments consumers are making, the relationship between positive and negative comments, and the power these comments can have on a business is Mochen Yang with the University of Minnesota, whose recently published research, featured in the INFORMS journal Information Systems Research, tackles these questions head on.

In the few short weeks between Thanksgiving and the New Year, the number of packages processed, transported and delivered by UPS will more than double to meet the demand of holiday gift giving! Joining us to provide a behind the scenes look at the busiest time of year for UPS is Ranganath Nuggehalli, principal scientist at UPS, to talk about how O.R. helps make the holidays merry!

This episode features my last interview with the 2019 President of INFORMS Ramayya Krishnan, professor and dean with the Heinz College of Information Systems and Public Policy at Carnegie Mellon University, as we look back over the milestones of his presidency, including INFORMS' advocacy work, as well as a look ahead to what’s next.