An Unconventional Business Model

The business of healthcare is unlike any other business. The primary objective of a health system is to provide best in class services, rather than to maximize profits. Most people would agree that this is a good thing. It’s also a rare thing in the competitive world of business. The admirable commitment to “patients before profits” puts every health system’s cash flow at constant risk. A health system has more control when it comes to providing services, but relatively little control over collecting payments for these services. Inefficiencies in collection processes and missed charges result in significant lower revenues and directly impact the bottom line.

How Do You Solve Box Office Scheduling? Watch a movie.

Michael Jahrer, VP of applied machine learning at Opera Solutions, proves his data science mettle by using deep learning to predict who will be a safe driver in the year ahead. 

Porto Seguro, the third-largest insurance company in Brazil, set out to improve its predictions of who would file an insurance claim in the next year. The company sponsored a competition through Kaggle, the premier platform for predictive modeling and analytics competitions, and our own Michael Jahrer, VP of applied machine learning, took home the win. 

Online shoppers are getting antsy. They’re spending less time thinking about purchases before buying — or leaving a site — and drastically shrinking marketers’ opportunity time. We explore the latest trends in online personalization — and how to keep up.

We spend a lot of time talking about personalization in marketing. That’s because it’s both the most profitable way for our customers to leverage artificial intelligence and the most challenging. A new paper by Seth Earley, published in IEEE’s November/December issue of IT Professional, lays out some of these challenges and addresses how best to overcome them.“AI-Driven Analytics at Scale: The Personalization Problem” touches on many of the issues our customers face every day, including maximizing data scientists’ time, developing use cases in a timely fashion, and even using a Signal Layer to help expedite the process. It also cites a new study that examines exactly how much time companies must apply their personalization insights in a real-time setting.

To predict the future, one must look at the past, says the old adage. To determine what to expect in 2017, we thought it was best to draw lessons from 2016 despite our industry’s yearning for dramatic change. Laks Srinivasan, COO at Opera Solutions, shares his insights into the biggest Big Data trends of 2016 and reflects on where the market is going and how companies will react.

Artificial intelligence is no longer just evolving nomenclature in IT. With the technology’s recent progress, organizations of all shapes and sizes are taking interest. With the mainstream press and industry analysts from every corner weighing in, it is worth taking stock of the technology and learning how to differentiate between three arguably over-hyped terms: machine learning, artificial intelligence (AI), and deep learning.

It’s best to consider the concentric model depicted in the figure below. AI is shown as the superset since it was the idea that came first, and it has been evolving and expanding since then. A subset of AI is machine learning, which came out of the quest of AI at an early stage. The innermost subset is deep learning, which is just one class of machine learning algorithms. Deep learning is a hot area right now, and the one most typically associated with the rise in AI today.