Yet the Giants have thrived once again
in the post-season and are, at the time of
this writing, just three games away from
winning the 2014 World Series. Though
I am surprised, Jonah Keri and Neil
Paine are not. Their recent article [2]
on fivethirtyeight.com states that after
analyzing a great deal of historical data,
they find that a team’s late season winning percentage is not a significant predictor of post-season success. The Major
League Baseball playoffs, it seems, are
(at least statistically) a whole new season.
Let’s go Giants!
Learning to translate. I have been a
university faculty member for the past 11
years. Prior to that, I spent 11 years in industry after finishing graduate school. On
the occasion of my 50th birthday, I find
that symmetry to be both amusingly coincidental and oddly appropriate, as I feel
as though I’ve been straddling the line
between industry and academia for all of
my adult life. Since becoming a professor, I have continued to work with startup companies in a variety of roles.
When considering whether or not to
get involved with a company, I typically
ask myself three questions:
• Does this company have a reasonably high probability of getting funded,
growing and/or ultimately becoming
successful?
a na l y t i c s
• Can I add value to this company by
helping them with the technical problems
and/or business problems that it is likely
to face?
• Will working with this company give
me a chance to learn something valuable
that I can share with my students and
colleagues?
I recently agreed to serve as an advisor to an exciting new start-up in Silicon Valley. My primary responsibilities
are to serve as a sounding board for
their lone data scientist and to provide
a bridge between this data scientist and
the company’s executive team. This role
in some form or another is an increasingly common one. As Anil Kaul, CEO of
AbsolutData, observed during one of our
research focus groups, “We are starting
to see a significant increase in the demand for high-level ‘translators’ within
data science project teams.”
Somehow it feels like I’ve been preparing for this role all my life.
Vijay Mehrotra ([email protected]) is a
professor in the Department of Business Analytics
and Information Systems at the University of San
Francisco’s School of Management. He is also a
longtime member of INFORMS.
REFERENCES
1. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bnZdlhUDEJo
2. http://fivethirtyeight.com/datalab/the-as-tailspinmight-not-matter-once-the-playoffs-start/
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