INFO RM S IN I T I AT I VE
Continuing ed courses set for San Jose
INFORMS’ popular continuing education
courses will be held June 20-21 (“Essential
Practice Skills for Analytics Professionals”)
and June 25-26 (“Data Exploration &
Visualization”) before and after, respectively,
the 2014 INFORMS Conference on the
Business of Big Data in San Jose, Calif.
Register early to save $100.
Essential Practice Skills for
Analytics Professionals
Taught by Dr. E. Andrew Boyd, Texas A&M,
University of Houston, and Houston Public Media
Participants will learn practical tools for
integrating their analytical skills into realworld problem solving for businesses and
other organizations. The course provides
Data Exploration & Visualization
Taught by Stephen McDaniel and Eileen
McDaniel, Freakalytics, LLC
Attendees will experience first-hand the
power of visualization in exploring data as
an adjunct to tried and trusted analytics
methods. Using a hands-on lecture and case
study approach, attendees will walk away
with a proven framework for data exploration
that is directly relevant to real-world problems
in many fields. Incorporating popular free and
leading software tools to facilitate hands-on
learning, attendees will be able to directly
apply the methods and techniques from
this course in their work, regardless of their
visualization tool of choice.
At the end of the course, participants are
approaches that can be applied immediately
to a wide variety of settings, whether within
expected to:
a participant’s own organization or for an
• ave confidence to explore new data using
h
external client. By the end of the course,
the exploration/visualization approach;
participants will:
• ave the ability to approach and deploy
h
• earn to link their subject-matter expertise
l
interactive visualization;
to the challenges of messy, unstructured
• nderstand how to identify practically
u
problems, organizational noise, and non-
meaningful discoveries;
technical decision makers; and
• nderstand best-practice techniques,
u
• xperience the use of state-of-the-art
e
including: problem statement summaries,
visualization software; and
issue trees, interview guides, work
• hink c