Discovery Summit

Triskaidekaphilia

John Sall, Co-Founder and Executive Vice President, SAS

Triskaidekaphilia. This word means “love of the number 13.” With the release of JMP^® 13, we plan to make this word meaningful. This session is a tour of some feature highlights of the new release.

Leading With Analytics: Fostering a Supportive Analytics Culture

Tom Lange, Retired Director of R&D, Procter & Gamble

Computing has revolutionized our lives – and not just with smartphones. Computing, analytics and data literacy, as well as the ability to influence non-expert decision makers, have become the essential skills for our time. But even more elusive are the leadership qualities required for building an organization where analytics is the norm and not the anomaly.

First things first. Why must analytics be organizationally mastered? Surprisingly, there are some important lessons in our past to visit. Innovation in retail and manufacturing has often used a combination of communications and analytics. Rivers, rails, roads, wires and satellites combined with arithmetic, calculators, computers and software have all fostered economic revolutions in their respective days, disrupting the previous technologies.

Today, the data explosion and its resulting opportunities challenge the leader in all of us to navigate “these modern times.” We will explore leadership features like developing a vision, responding with courage, building mastery, and displaying your passion through the lens of leading analytics.

DOE: Is the Future Optimal?

Christopher Nachtsheim, Professor and Chair of Operations and Management Sciences at Carlson School of Management, University of Minnesota

In this presentation, I will chronicle the history of designed experiments, summarize the current state of the art, and make prognostications about the future of DOE. Along the way, I will identify the weaknesses inherent in observational studies and why cause and effect can only be rigorously identified through designed experiments. We’ll explore the negative implications of this for “big data” and predictive modeling, as well as the nature of web-based experiments in social media. I’ll illustrate state-of-the-art methods using a number of real-world applications and JMP.

Complicated Stuff in Simple Words

Randall Munroe, Creator, Webcomic xkcd

In a world filled with jargon, it’s refreshing to hear from a subject-matter expert who can communicate in a direct and uncomplicated fashion – so that even a layperson would understand.

You could say this is Randall Munroe’s mission. Munroe is masterful at using math, science and comics to make a point. His website, xkcd, showcases stick figure comics with themes in computer science, technology, mathematics, science, philosophy, language, pop culture and romance. And in his latest book, Thing Explainer, he uses the 1,000 (or, rather, ten hundred) most common words in the English language to explain concepts like how smartphones work, the periodic table and nuclear reactors. As the book’s subtitle suggests, complicated stuff in simple words.

Munroe is a former NASA roboticist who, on a typical day, puzzles over absurd hypothetical questions about science, many of which come in from fans of his blog What If?

How does he get to an answer?

Much like a statistician or data analyst, he uses what he knows to model for things that he doesn’t know. “I love calculating these kinds of things, and it's not that I love doing the math…” Munroe says in his TED talk. “What I love is that it lets you take some things that you know, and just by moving symbols around on a piece of paper, find out something that you didn't know that's very surprising.”