Building a platform for mathematical optimization in the real world

Speaker: Andy Ferris
Affiliation: Elara AI

Abstract

The world is filled with problems amenable to mathematical modelling and optimization. Every organisation wants to optimize their performance, from businesses maximising their profits to hospitals trying to achieve the best outcomes for patients. However, there is a big difference in difficulty between solving a mathematical problem once on a data scientist’s laptop, and deploying an ongoing solution to a real-world problem encountered every single day. At Elara, we are building a platform and methodology for rapidly building and delivering mathematical solutions to problems in a wide range of industries. In this talk, I will give some examples of real-world problems and how we go about solving them, cover some of the challenges faced applying mathematics in industry, and describe how we go about building a platform robust enough to deploy to critical real-world settings without compromising on mathematical tools or numerical performance.

Biography:

Andy Ferris is the Chief Science Officer at Elara AI, a Brisbane-based startup that applies mathematical optimization, simulation and machine learning to help businesses and organisations make decisions and perform at their best. Andy did his PhD in quantum information and computational physics at the University of Queensland and continued as an early-career researcher in Canada and Spain. He then returned to Brisbane and moved to the software industry, joining Fugro Roames to help model the physical world based on remote-sensing data (lidar, aerial imagery, etc) and prevent fires, faults and injuries from the power network. Nowadays, Andy is building a cloud platform at Elara and providing solutions to problems in a range of industries, from mining and heavy industry to retail, banking and healthcare.