Real Time Decision Systems

Zahir Balaporia

Schneider National

Real Time Dispatch Optimization

Optimization is at the core of Schneider Intermodal’s driver dispatch process. At peak volumes the optimization matches thousands of hours of capacity with thousands of shipments, creating a very large and complex optimization problem to solve in real time. The data changes continuously based on updates from drivers, updates from railroads, updates from container sensors, changes to freight availability, and plans that are running ahead or behind schedule. This talk will cover:

• An introduction to the technology framework, problem partitioning, and parallelization used to solve the optimization problem.
• The change management program used for training frontline and upstream users.
• The use of Hadoop to store optimization log files and the potential to use the data to feedback into the optimization process.
• Successes and continuing challenges in deploying a semi autonomous real time dispatch optimization system.

Bio

Zahir Balaporia is Director, Process and Technology at Schneider, a premier provider of transportation, logistics and related services. He is responsible for implementation of business optimization technologies and related processes within the company’s Intermodal division. Prior to moving into the Intermodal line of business, he led the corporate Decision Engineering Team, which specializes in the application of advanced analytics for operational, tactical and strategic decision support. A Certified Analytics Professional with more than 20 years of experience, he is acknowledged in the books Competing on Analytics by Davenport and Harris, and The New Know by Thornton May. Zahir has an MS in Industrial Engineering from Purdue University and a BS in Computer Engineering from Clarkson University. He is pursuing an MS in System Dynamics from Worcester Polytechnic Institute.

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Evan Carstedt

Accenture

Capitalizing on the Transformative Power of Mobility

Engage in a provocative discussion of how Mobility is driving transformation within and across industry lines.  Accenture’s point of view on how mobility is driving connections between people, devices, products, and digital services, and the implications of this for organizations will be discussed.  As mobile technologies and the Internet of Things create high volumes of new data types, the ways this data is analyzed and returned to user as insights will need to evolve to keep pace.

Bio

Evan is a Managing Director in Accenture’s Digital Practice with over 14+ years of experience working with mobile architectures & emerging technologies across multiple industries.  Evan currently leads the team supporting all of the Mobility Strategy work taking place within North America which includes work like: mobile consumer or enterprise IT strategies, BYOD/MDM strategies, architecture/technical evaluations, and Connected Product/Internet of Things strategies. In this role Evan helps clients to think through the implications that mobility has for them as a data source and as a tool for displaying the results of analytics and data analysis.  Evan’s work across a variety of industries and with both the technology and business processes allows him to take current mobile industry trends and help clients apply them in actionable ways.

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Joe DeCosmo

ENOVA International

Building a Real-time Analytics Engine from Scratch; Case Study of Enova International

Enova International is an online lender that operates in the US, UK, Canada, Australia, Brazil and China. Enova was faced with the task of building a real-time analytics engine to facilitate the underwriting of customers, lead import decisions and marketing efforts. This system needed to be able to easily implement cutting-edge statistical techniques while maintaining throughput of at least 300k requests per hour. This talk will discuss the requirements of the system, provide background information and will walk the viewer through the process of designing and implementing the platform. Additionally, learnings about what went well and what did not go well will be shared. The audience will leave the talk with practical knowledge about how to get started implementing a comparable system.

Bio

Joe joined Enova as Chief Analytics Officer in January of 2014. Prior to working at Enova, he served as Director and Practice Leader of Advanced Analytics for Chicago-based West Monroe Partners. He also held a number of executive positions at HAVI Global Solutions and the Allant Group. In 1995 Joe founded and led DeCosmo and Associates, Inc., an analytics consulting firm that he grew from start-up to ten employees that was acquired by The Allant Group in 2005.  Joe received a BA in Economics from Lewis University and an MA in Economics from the University of Illinois at Chicago. He currently serves on the boards of the Chicago Chapter of the American Statistical Association, where he is currently President-Elect of the Association, and the UIC College of Business Administration. Joe is also a Past-President of the Chicago Association of Direct Marketing.

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Brad Klenz

SAS

Event Stream Processing for Power Grid Analysis

SAS has been working with real time sensor data collected from the power transmission grid to gain insight into the dynamic operation and stability of the wide area network.  The project  has focused on real-time capturing and cleansing of the Phasor Measurement Unit (PMU) data, as well as utilizing advanced analytic techniques for base-lining, event detection, event classification, and event impact. The initial phase involved setting up methods to pull data from the PMUs, analyzing the data for data quality issues and establishing automated data cleansing schemes so the data is always ready for analysis.  The PMU measurements were based-lined for steady state and used to project real-time forecasts.  The residual of the forecast to the incoming measurements then provide immediate detection of events on the system, in addition to minimizing false positives.  When events are detected, time-series machine learning techniques are used to classify the event (i.e. momentary line trip, generator trip, equipment issue, etc.).  Analysis is then performed to determine the impact of the event on system stability. This presentation provides an overview of the end-to-end process to provide context and then provides details on the advanced times-series machine learning techniques used for classifying the events.

Bio

Brad Klenz is Principal Architect in Advanced Analytics R&D at SAS.  His responsibilities include the design and integration of technologies required by SAS’ Analytical Solutions.  His recent projects include Streaming Data Analysis for the Energy sector, Customer Intelligence, and Asset Performance Analytics.  He received a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science from North Carolina State University.

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Ashish Verma

Deloitte Consulting

The Internet of Things: Innovations and Commercialization Ideas

Discover the internet of everything (IoT); smart, connected products that is transforming businesses and how Deloitte is Innovating and Commercializing an idea whose time has come.

Internet of Everything (IoT) continues to give rise to new business models in Retail, Industrial Manufacturing, Healthcare, Insurance, Medical device manufacturers, Telecommunications and Technology industries. Come learn what those efforts are and how to capitalize on these opportunities at your clients.

Our conversation will include the following:

• What is IoT?
• The IoT Ecosystem
• Impact of IoT on Industries
• How to unlock value for your clients?
• Selected Use Cases

Bio

Ashish is a Director with Deloitte Consulting and has over 17 plus years of management consulting experience with multiple fortune 100 clients in building solutions that focus on solving complex business problems related to realizing the value of information assets within an enterprise. Ashish leads the Big Data Analytics and Innovation and Architecture Initiative for Deloitte Consulting building offerings for selected use cases with vendor partners. Ashish is a frequent speaker at external conferences and has published and presented on the challenges of overcoming Information Integration and Management at vendor conferences and Deloitte TMT and CFO Dbriefs.

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