Watching the field evolve
AA: How have you seen the field evolve over your 20-year career? How have you seen it change in terms of attitudes in organizations toward leveraging analytics to change decision-making? I think it’s still quite new for many organizations. Would you agree?
AG: I completely agree with you. I think attitudes toward analytics have changed completely over the last 20 years. I’ll talk about the fundamental reason first, then move to the technical, and then answer the specific question on organizations and the business front.
I think there is a fundamental reason why it has changed, evolved, and grown so much. The reason is not to do with the foundation of statistics and mathematics because, as you are well aware, some of the models or theories were already there. Neural networks are not something new.
Over the last 20 years, we saw the growth of computers, with the number of chips multiplying along with computing power and storage. We have...