Skip to content

Technology Showcase

Take advantage of these pre-conference workshops for a hands on demonstration of the latest in Analytics software. All attendees are welcome to join onsite or pre-register through the self-service center. Descriptions Below

Engineering USA

Pathmind & Engineering USA: Solving Complex Business Problems with Simulation and AI

Monday, April 12, 10-10:40am

Presented by: Sahar Esmaeilzadeh, Luigi Manca

Engineering USA presents technology partner Pathmind. Businesses using simulation modeling to solve problems need an optimization method capable of handling the complexities and variability of real-world operations. When traditional optimizers and heuristics underperform, Pathmind’s AI can help. Using a branch of AI called reinforcement learning (RL), Pathmind can beat your heuristic and offer new insights into speed and profitability. Pathmind makes it easy to adopt Reinforcement Learning, even for teams without AI experts or experience with neural networks. During this showcase, you will:

  • Learn key RL terms
  • Examine how Pathmind RL is implemented in a model
  • See the steps of uploading a model to Pathmind and training an AI policy
  • Compare how a Pathmind AI policy performs against the heuristic

All attendees will be invited to create a free Pathmind account.

FICO

Calling all OR Heroes: Learn How to Model and Deploy Solutions in 75% Less Time with FICO® Xpress Insight

Monday, April 12, 11:30am-12:10pm

Presented by: Baykal Hafizoglu 

Join our hands-on workshop to experience how FICO® Xpress Insight helps you read data in any format from any source, integrates with your own machine learning and solvers (or Xpress Solver), enables collaboration with business users, deploys decision support or automated solutions in the cloud or on premises —and does it all in 75% less time.

  • Get the overview of the great new features of FICO® Xpress Solver, Mosel, Workbench, and Insight
  • Learn how you can rapidly deploy Python models with FICO Xpress Insight
  • Discover the new View Designer, which reduces GUI development times from minutes to seconds
  • Experience real-world business examples in which developers integrate their own solver(s) with the powerful Xpress Insight platform
  • See how the flexible, free-to-use Xpress Mosel modeling and programming language allows you to make your solver available to thousands of other Mosel users

All attendees will receive a link to the complimentary FICO® Xpress Optimization Community License.

IBM

Accelerate your journey to AI with IBM Watson Studio and Cloud Pak for Data

Tuesday, April 13, 10-10:40am

Presented by: Alex Jones, Offering Management, Data Science and AI, IBM

Too often Data Science projects are limited or delayed by lack of access to skilled specialists and inefficient, siloed development structures which require expensive rework as models progress throughout their lifecycle. See how IBM Cloud Pak for Data and Watson Studio enables you to bring together data scientists and business analysts with diverse backgrounds and experiences into collaborative project environments, along with trusted data sources, to break down these barriers and make data science a team sport.

JMP, a Division of SAS

Analyzing Multidimensional Data with Ease

Tuesday, April 13, 11:30am-12:10pm

Presented by: Kevin Potcner, Kevin.Potcner@jmp.com

As data becomes more prevalent across almost every industry, practitioners are typically faced with needing to make business decisions based on the analysis of many variables simultaneously. For students to be prepared for today’s job market, they need to become proficient in techniques that are capable of finding patterns and relationships across these large and often messy datasets. The presenter will illustrate how JMP’s interactive environment makes it easy to explore highly dimensional data intuitively using dynamic visualizations and data mining tools.

LINDO Systems, Inc.

Useful Tips on Building Optimization Based Multi-Period Planning Models

Monday, April 12, 10:45-11:25am

Presented by: Linus Schrage

Successful multi-period planning models can have periods that range from 15 minutes (staff scheduling, electricity generator scheduling) to a year (petroleum, mining, and forest planning) with planning horizons ranging from 1 day to 60 years. Learn the keys to designing useful multi-period models, considering such issues as choice of objective function; modeling taxes; uncertainty; inventory features such as backlogging, lost sales, perishable products, compressible inventories such as natural gas; representing interactions among projects, such as precedence constraints, resource constraints; choosing ending and starting conditions; when and how to use steady state models; rolling/sliding schedules and combatting “nervous” plans; choosing period length, planning horizon, starting and ending conditions. Many of these tips will be illustrated with examples in LINGO and What’sBest!.