The Analytics
Fever
Newsletter for Analytics Society, IIMB
The Growing Analytics
Industry
Written by PVS Pavan Chandra
Since the last decade, the field of data analytics is arguably the most
proliferating field in terms of innovations as well as applicability. With the
realization of this rapid upsurge, under the hood and on the outside, there
is now an increase in deployment of data analytic models in the
businesses today and the focus now is towards democratization of data
science. This also comes due to development of graphical front ends for
implementing models which makes it as easy as clicking buttons to
perform analytics. Cloud technologies including the AWS by Amazon allow
small businesses which do not have the necessary resources, to
implement big data and it's applications. Amazon is leading on this front
with its continuous progress on its AWS platform and recent innovations
including data lakes to enable storage of data in a single repository,
custom designed chip for inference from data to rapidly improve
performance, a machine learning market place for developers to sell their
models and RoboMaker, a service to enable easy building and deployment
of learning algorithms for robotic applications. Moreover tools like
Kuberflow provide efficient and scalable implementations for
people without the requisite hardware and infrastructural expertise.
Self service Business Intelligence (BI) tools like Tableau, Qlik
Sense, Power BI, and Domo also aim at the same by providing
business managers quick and easy access to analyses and
information in graphical form.
Due to the now ubiquitous application of analytics including in the
fields of medicine and policy making and in particular use of
machine learning models like neural networks which lack the
theoretical underpinnings and comprehension regarding their
function and behaviour, there is now an increasing focus on
understanding why a model yields a particular prediction. In other
words, there is now a focus on understanding how a model works
so it is possible to eliminate bias from the models. This has now
also given rise to development of ethics around AI and use of
analytics and also attention to risks regarding their use. Using
Deepfake, developers have now demonstrated how easy it is to
create videos depicting people saying things they might never
have said. These also include issues about privacy and ethical use
of a user's data and also it's security. We see now regulations from
Business
the governments to address them including the General Data
Protection Regulation (GDPR) by the Europeon Union which
Intelligence (BI)
provides it's citizens more control over their data. This also lead to tools like Tableau,
companies updating their privacy policies and is encouraging
similar regulations worldwide like the California Consumer Privacy Qlik Sense, Power
Act which goes into effect from January, 2020.
Due to the rapid expansion of the field, there is now also focus and BI, and Domo also
development in automation of many anaytic procedures. The
interest now is in human guided to fully automatic machine aim at the same by
learning and data analysis. Companies are now increasing
deploying libraries for automatic cleansing, integration, ingesion providing business
and analysis of data. In particular, automated machine learning
(AutoML) is showing rapid progress with increasing availability of managers quick and
graphical implementations for technical tasks like feature
engineering, model search, tuning of hyperparameters, etc. easy access to
On the technical side of development, in machine learning, analyses and
Reinforcement learning which has shown significant promise in it's
application for robotics and self driving cars, is now undergoing
information in
rapid progress. The developers at Uber introduced family of
algorithms, Go-Explore which achieves average scores of 400,000
graphical form
with maximums as high as 2,000,000 which beats the previous
state of the art average and max scores of 11347 and 17500
respectively by a huge margin on the Atari game Montezuma's
Revenge.
Analytics Society Task 2
PVS Pavan Chandra
Analytics as a field or a tool is no longer only of the tech world. Many important business
entities are increasingly using analytics in order to take optimal decisions. In this era of an-
alytics, I believe the presence of an Analytics Society is essential at a management institute
like IIM Bangalore. The presence of such a society allows students to discuss the various
applications of this “tool” in businesses and conduct hands-on business analytics workshops
in order to get everyone on campus aware of the potential uses of analytics. With business
analytics growing at an incredible pace, many students are sure to land a few placements in
that field. A primer in the form of a workshop with real life problems and scenarios will be
extremely beneficial to the students and help them gain more from their summer internship.
Analytics as a subject is wel suited to those who have an analytical mindset, are interested
in tackling challenging business problems, and possess an inclination towards mathematics. I
am a theoretical physicist by graduation and have some knowledge of the mathematics used.
I am extremely passionate about quantitative fields such as physics and analytics, having
done a Master’s thesis in the former. The work ethic I have developed through the many
research projects I have done should serve me well in contributing to the society and I look
forward to learning many new concepts as a part of the society.
