The emergence of Business Analytics (BA) is a natural consequence of recent changes in technology and business needs. Columbia Engineering, with its strong collaboration with the Columbia Business School, is uniquely positioned to combine emerging technologies in cryptography, network security, blockchains, with optimization, operation research, marketing, game theory, and machine learning to develop new products and services to address societal needs. The goal of BA is to expand the data capabilities of businesses, and integrate them into synergistic end-to-end business cycle solutions: planning, data collection and standardization, model calibration, decision making and predictions. An important application of BA is financial services, from smart contracts and payment systems, to risk management and portfolio optimization. A key BA building block machine-learning and AI technologies that apply statistical learning tools and optimization to study, visualize and identify salient features in the data, and design computationally efficient algorithmic solutions. In addition to business applications, at Columbia Engineering, we are using BA to develop solutions for global challenges such as climate change and its ramifications, healthcare and pandemic response, and various emerging societal issues involving education, migration and food security and supply. However, broad deployment of analytics solutions are raising new questions regarding the privacy of the underlying data and the potentially disparate impact across different population groups. Thus, understanding both the power and the potential pitfalls of these new technologies is equally critical.
