Frisk “Flexible” – Augmenting Human Decision Making with Data Science

I recently listened to a podcast – episode #56 of This Week in Machine Learning and AI – in which James Guszcza said a few things that resonated with me. James is currently an AI consultant with Deloitte and has previously worked as an analyst on data driven credit score reporting and insurance quotes.

If you’re into data science, I think it’s worth a listen. A big takeaway for me was an analogy he drew between freestyle chess and methods of augmenting human decision making with data science tools. In short, in a freestyle chess competition where supercomputers, software assistance and any skill level of chess player are able to compete together and/or separately, a pair of amateur players with off the shelf software on laptops won the competition. A chess master, Kasparov, noted that a weak competitor, with a weak computer program, working together more efficiently, will beat a superior competitor with superior computer assistance with inferior methods of working together.

The challenge for data driven decision making today is finding a sweet spot of augmented humans. The onus in meeting this challenge is currently being met (ad-hoc) by an awkward partnership between business experts, data scientists and developers. The deep understanding of the ‘relevant question’ has to be translated for those who can drive the increasingly complex systems that house the relevant data.

An optimal freestyle solution is when intuitive applications deliver data to drive well informed decisions that are supported by the meta/strategic thinking which is still well out of reach for machine learning algorithms acting alone.

Frisk “Flexible” offers an effective framework for delivering data insights in an intuitive way. A responsive, rapidly deployable discovery interface can be created based on the data scientist’s insights into the data. Non-technical staff get a self-service, user friendly interface with appropriate security and auditing to view and understand the data insights that may augment their decision making.

By Jesse Bugden, Chief Architect at Frisk-Search Pty Ltd