INS IDE STO RY
Quantified warriors
What’s a nice defense consultancy
company such as the Perduco Group doing in the sports analytics space?
That’s the question I asked Stephen
Chambal, co-founder of Perduco, after
attending his session on “opportunities,
barriers and lessons learned” in sports
analytics at the recent INFORMS Conference on Business Analytics & Operations
Research in Boston. As Chambal notes
in his article on the same topic in this issue of Analytics, there’s a “simple” answer (sports are fun) and a “real” answer
(his company’s core capabilities and the
business opportunities the sports industry presents, combined with a couple of
chance encounters, triggered Perduco’s
strategic push into the sports arena).
As it turns out, the defense community and the sports community are not that
far apart in terms of their ultimate goals.
They’re both interested in prevailing on
the “battlefield,” whether it’s a desert in
the Middle East or a basketball court in
Madison Square Garden, and they’re
both interested in the so-called “quantified warrior” – the ability to monitor and
assess a soldier’s/professional athlete’s
condition and to understand how to
optimize their performance on their
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respective battlefields. It all makes for a
fascinating story, but before I give away
too much of it, click here.
Chambal’s session was just one of
many sessions I attended at the Boston conference. From Tom Davenport’s
opening keynote talk on “Analytics 3.0”
(look for an article on that topic in a future
issue of Analytics magazine, but in the
meantime, click here to see his thoughts
on predictive analytics in this issue) to
the Oscar-esque Edelman Gala, from the
four dozen poster presentations to the
non-stop series of networking events, the
conference was first rate.
From my perspective as the editor of
Analytics as well as OR/MS Today (the
membership magazine of INFORMS),
there’s nothing more energizing than attending a conference such as the Boston
event, and I suspect that holds true for
anyone involved in the analytics community. If you couldn’t make it to Boston or
even if you did and are craving another
analytics fix, fear not. INFORMS will present its inaugural Big Data Conference on
June 22-24 in San Jose, Calif.
– PETER HORNER, EDITOR
peter.horner@ mail.informs.org
W W W. I N F O R M S . O R G