Editor’s Note December 2016 Heartiest greetings to all! With great excitement and fervour, team Quantinuum presents “Quriosity”- the Quant magazine of SIMSR. In this issue, we have the main story by Bharat Gupta on “How can finance professionals take advantage of predictive analytics?” talks about how Big Data by means of Predictive analytics is used by forward-looking finance organizations to forecast future performance and drive strategic decision-making. The sub article by Milcah George on “Starbucks - Brewing a cup of data”, which describes how Starbucks has made extensive use of data analytics to build up its strategy by incorporating different measures. In our Quant guru section, Rupal Doshi writes about Nilakantha Somayaji, who was a major mathematician and astronomer of the Kerala School of astronomy and mathematics. The article describes one of his major influential works, which is a comprehensive astronomical treatise, named as ‘Tantrasamgraha’. The News digest features news related to Amazon Go- a high-tech retail store concept, Jinie India’s first HR chatbot, acquisition of artificial intelligence startup Geometric Intelligence by Uber, acquisition of Augment IQ, a Pune based Data Analytics start-up by L& T Infotech, which has been covered by Maheshwaran Kumar. Quriosity updates by Arunava Dey cover missions by NASA to explore the early solar system, black holes and cosmic x-ray mysteries. In our Quants Fun section we have an article by Amod Kulkarni which talks how mathematics can be made a fun exercise for children by helping them understand mathematical concepts in an enjoyable way. So, look around and enjoy reading about the quantitative aspects around the world. Happy Learning, Editorial Team!
Topics
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How Can Finance Professionals Take Advantage of 4 Predictive Analytics? By Bharat Gupta Starbucks – brewing a cup of data By Milcah George
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News Digest By Maheshwaran
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Quant Guru By Rupal Doshi
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Quriosity Updates By Arunava Dey
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Quant Fun By Amod Kulkarni
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Quant Connect
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Cover Story December 2016 How Can Finance Professionals Take Advantage of Predictive Analytics? Predictive analytics help CFOs use data for more accurate planning, forecasting, and decision making based on what’s happening now and what’s likely to happen, rather than what happened in the past.
Finance professionals today recognize the need to extract value from the inundation of data. As their job gets more complex, the need for tools that allow for increased efficiency is crucial. In fact, a recent global survey from SAP and CFO Research found that three-quarters of CFOs and financial executives anticipate making effective use of Big Data over the next five years. But how can data best be harnessed in order to gain valuable insights? Predictive analytics is one of the key use cases for Big Data that forward-looking finance organizations are implementing to forecast future performance and drive strategic decisionmaking. For background, predictive analytics refers to the capability of an organization to discover and communicate meaningful patterns in data to predict and improve business performance, recommend action, and guide decision-making.
Common Use Cases for Predictive Analytics Traditionally, software has been useful in reading and analyzing structured data, but the volume of unstructured data – from external financial reporting systems, RFID sensors, and social media, for example – is exploding. Predictive analytics can help CFOs and other finance professionals harness data for more accurate planning, forecasting, and decision making based on what’s happening now and what’s likely to happen, rather than what happened in the past. There are a number of routine processes that can be improved or enhanced using predictive analytics, including:
Cash forecasting: Leveraging data insights, financial professionals can look at trends to identify slow and fast payers, detect system issues and address and improve receivable management.
Detection of financial risks: Financial departments can leverage predictive analytics to establish baseline criteria that makes it easier to identify outliers before they can hurt overall company performance.
Company performance risk management: Predictive analytics can also help finance professionals get a forecasted “sneak preview” into the financial mid-period to avoid surprising news.
Receivables aging: Finance professional can optimize receivables aging processes and collect overdue amounts faster by setting alerts when customers deviate from past payment patterns. Source:http://daily.financialexecutives.org/can-finance-professionals-takeadvantage-predictive-analytics/ By Bharat Gupta PGDM FS (2015-17)
STARBUCKS – BREWING A CUP OF DATA
Starbucks is the only coffee brand that is on the list of 100 most recognized brands in the world. The size and the number of locations that the outlets of this company are present in contributes to the popularity the brand enjoys. The company has relied on the extensive use of data analytics to build up its strategy, as we can see below.
STORE LOCATION: The coffee chain has set up outlets in clusters of 4 or 5 in very close proximity to each other, this would seem counter intuitive. However with the backing of strong data analysis the coffee chain has reaped huge profits with this strategy. Starbucks uses the business intelligence platform atlas to analyze prime locations for its stores. It analyses consumer demographics, population density, income levels, auto traffic patterns, public transport stops and the types of stores / businesses in the location under evaluation. From this the company gets information about the level of traffic and the spending
capacity of prospective customers. Using this, the company determines if the location is viable economically or not. STARBUCKS EVENINGS: The company had started this venture to attract customer during the later part of the days. The company always had maximum foot traffic during the day time as customers would rush to get their coffee on the way to work. However, after the office hours most employees head to the local pub to relax. In order to cash in on this opportunity the company started selling beer and wine at many stores in the US. The platform Atlas provides the company with information regarding areas with high alcohol consumption. Based on this pattern, the store location is selected. BRAVING THE SUMMER HEAT: Another time when Starbucks loses on customers is during summers when customers prefer cold beverages. The caffeine purveyor launched a local Frappucino in the city of Memphis by predicting the arrival of Heat waves using Atlas. STARBUCKS LOYALTY PROGRAM Starbucks Rewards is regarded as one of the best retail loyalty programs. This revolutionary rewards program has created a loyal following of customers. The company uses the customer data in order to track down product purchasing behavior and Delivers targeted advertising and planned discounts directly to your mobile devices Thus, we can see that every step of strategy is backed up by a strong data driven foundation resulting in the company being branded as the second most valuable fast food brand worldwide in the year 2015. Source: https://digit.hbs.org/submission/starbucks-brewing-up-a-data-storm/ By Milcah George PGDM Core (2016-18)
News Digest December 2016 Amazon Go makes the retail checkout a thing of the past Amazon go is a high-tech retail store concept – that enables the customers to swipe their smartphones and pick up whatever they want, dunk it in the grocery bag and check out without waiting in long queues. Even though the technology behind it is not sufficiently clear, experts have gleaned that Amazon Go uses a convergence of technology – computer vision, sensor fusion and deep learning algorithms that helps in learning what the customer has touched, bought or put back on the shelf. Currently, there is one Amazon Go store operational in Seattle which is in beta mode and opens only to Amazon employees. According to reports, it would be officially open to the public early next year. Amazon Go app is a must have if you want to shop in their store. Customers will have to scan their phones with the app. Reports reveal there are a lot of cameras and sensors involved. From what we glean is, Just Walkout technology senses whatever you pick, touch, put back on the shelf, tracks it and adds it to the cart automatically. Once you finish shopping, the bill is debited from Amazon account. It seems that there is going to be another disruption in retail market. Introduction Video : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NrmMk1Myrxc Peoplestrong unveils Jinie- India’s first HR chatbot HR would soon become a conversational interface from just being a transactional interface, thanks to the very first chatbot– Jinie, which is here to make the whole process of HR management more engaging and impactful. It is brought to you by Peoplestrong – one of the India’s leading human resource (HR) solutions and HR Technology Companies in the world. This personal-work life assistant can help an employee solve any HR related query-right from applying leaves to managing other employee transactions. In a nutshell, Jinie is there for an employee every time. Through this platform, employees can connect with their natural groups and have live conversations. It would ensure security needed in enterprise system by eliminating the use of Facebook/ Whatsapp and other mediums. Hence keeping a check on what kind of data goes public right from sales data to employee data. It would ensure encryption while providing the ease of communication to all its users. “It will prove to be the biggest advantage for the enterprise as it will be available virtually 24/7, giving employees on the field instant access to transactions and HR data, regardless of location or time zone,” said Mr. Pankaj Bansal Cofounder and CEO of PeopleStrong.
Uber acquires artificial intelligence startup Geometric Intelligence Now Uber would count on the likes of tech giants such as Google, Amazon, IBM, Facebook and others as it is all set to invest in artificial intelligence. Uber has acquired Geometric Intelligence. The deal which was closed at an undisclosed amount would see the 15 members from Geometric Intelligence forming the initial core of the AI Labs team. The two-year-old company was founded by a group of noted scientists and leading machine learning pioneers with an aim to redefine boundaries of machine learning through innovative, patent-pending techniques that learn more efficiently from less data. Uber is set to explore AI capabilities of Geometric Intelligence and utilize the same for solving problems like matching riders for UberPOOL, determining optimal route and tracking if the food or car you have ordered, working of self-driving vehicles which also includes Uber flying car. The formation of Uber AI labs comes as a commitment of the company to advance the state of the art, driven by their vision that moving people and things in the physical world can be radically faster, safer and accessible to all. L&T Infotech to Acquire Augment IQ, an Analytics Start-up Leading global IT services and solutions provider L&T Infotech announced that it will acquire Pune based AugmentIQ Data Sciences Pvt. Ltd., an innovative start-up offering IP-based, big data and analytics solutions that helps enterprises derive business benefits from big data. The deal will enrich and expand LTI’s high-end analytics offerings across industries. As a result of this acquisition, LTI will gain access to MAXIQ, the big data platform developed by AugmentIQ, which is currently servicing one of the world’s largest credit bureaus, large banks as well as regulatory agencies. Also, the proprietary identity resolution technology from AugmentIQ is among the best in its class and can be adopted to solve the emerging needs of regulatory authorities across all markets. MAXIQ from AugmentIQ brings the power of automation and Do-it-Yourself (DIY) to big data. Its end-to-end, self-service approach enables business users to leverage big data technologies such as Hadoop & Spark easily. It connects the power of these technologies to real business outcomes in a fraction of usual time and cost. The proposed acquisition will enable LTI to build upon MAXIQ by integrating it within LTI’s MOSAIC Decision Science platform. MOSAIC Decision Science from LTI is designed for ease of data ingestion, data discovery, and industry specific use cases for accelerated data-driven decision making. It comes pre-packaged with more than 20 industry-specific machine learning algorithms based on deep learning techniques to jump-start the analytics journey of an organization with prescriptive and predictive analytics across business functions. Source: www.analyticsindiamag.com
By Maheshwaran PGDM Core (2016-18)
QuantGuru December 2016 NILAKANTHA SOMAYAJI
Nilakantha was born into a Namputiri Brahmin family which came from South Malabar in Kerala. The Nambudiri is an orthodox caste whose members consider themselves descendants of the ancient Vedic religion. Nilakantha worshipped the personified deity Soma who was the "master of plants" and the healer of disease. This explains the name Somayaji which means he was from a family qualified to conduct the Soma ritual. The Tantrasamgraha is his major astronomy treatise written in 1501. It consists of 432 Sanskrit verses divided into 8 chapters, and it covers various aspects of Indian astronomy. The Tantrasamgraha is very important in terms of the mathematics Nilakantha uses. In particular he uses results discovered by Madhava and it is an important source of the remarkable mathematical results which he discovered. However, Nilakantha does not just use Madhava's results, he extends them and improves them. An anonymous commentary entitled Tantrasangraha-vakhya appeared and, somewhat later in about 1550, Jyesthadeva published a commentary entitled Yuktibhasa that contained proofs of the earlier results by Madhava and Nilakantha. This is quite unusual for an Indian text in giving mathematical proofs. The series π/4 = 1 - 1/3 + 1/5 - 1/7 + ... is a special case of the series representation for arctan, namely tan-1x = x - x3/3 + x5/5 - x7/7 + ... It is well known that one simply puts x = 1 to obtain the series for π/4. The contributions of two European mathematicians to this series are well known but the results on this series in the work of Madhava are nearly three hundred years earlier as presented by Nilakantha in the Tantrasamgraha is also discussed. Nilakantha derived the series expansion tan-1x = x - x3/3 + x5/5 - x7/7 + ... by obtaining an approximate expression for an arc of the circumference of a circle and then considering the limit. An interesting feature of his work was his introduction of several additional series for π/4 that converged more rapidly than
Ď€/4 = 1 - 1/3 + 1/5 - 1/7+ ... . The author of [4] provides a reconstruction of how he may have arrived at these results based on the assumption that he possessed a certain continued fraction representation for the tail series 1/(n+2) - 1/(n+4) + 1/(n+6) - 1/(n+8) + .... . The Tantrasamgraha is not the only work of Nilakantha of which we have the text. He also wrote Golasara which is written in fifty-six Sanskrit verses and shows how mathematical computations are used to calculate astronomical data. The Siddhanta Darpana is written in thirty-two Sanskrit verses and describes a planetary model. The Candracchayaganita is written in thirty-one Sanskrit verses and explains the computational methods used to calculate the moon's zenith distance. Source: http://www.sanskritimagazine.com/vedic_science/nilakantha-somayajiastronomermathematician-of-kerala-school-of-astronomy/
By Rupal Doshi PGDM FS(2016-18)
Quriosity Updates December 2016 NASA Selects Two Missions to Explore the Early Solar System
An artist’s conception of the Lucy spacecraft flying by the Trojan Eurybates – one of the six diverse and scientifically important Trojans to be studied. Trojans are fossils of planet formation and so will supply important clues to the earliest history of the solar system. Psyche, the first mission to the metal world 16 Psyche will map features, structure, composition, and magnetic field, and examine a landscape unlike anything explored before. Psyche will teach us about the hidden cores of the Earth, Mars, Mercury and Venus. NASA has selected two missions that have the potential to open new windows on one of the earliest eras in the history of our solar system – a time less than 10 million years after the birth of our sun. The missions, known as Lucy and Psyche, were chosen from five finalists and will proceed to mission formulation, with the goal of launching in 2021 and 2023, respectively. Lucy will visit a target-rich environment of Jupiter’s mysterious Trojan asteroids, while Psyche will study a unique metal asteroid that’s never been visited before.
NASA Selects Mission to Study Black Holes, Cosmic Xray Mysteries NASA has selected a science mission that will allow astronomers to explore, for the first time, the hidden details of some of the most extreme and exotic astronomical objects, such as stellar and supermassive black holes, neutron stars and pulsars. Objects such as black holes can heat surrounding gases to more than a million degrees. The highenergy X-ray radiation from this gas can be polarized – vibrating in a particular direction. The Imaging X-ray Polarimetry Explorer (IXPE) mission will fly three space telescopes with cameras capable of measuring the polarization of these cosmic X-rays, allowing scientists to answer fundamental questions about these turbulent and extreme environments where gravitational, electric and magnetic fields are at their limits. Source: www.nasa.gov By Arunava Dey PGDM FS (2016-18)
QUANTS FUN December 2016 A little fun with Mathematics
Arthur Conan Doyle's famous literary detective Sherlock Holmes once noted that "the little things are infinitely the most important.� Whether they are seeking to understand the tiniest forms of life, taking small steps towards major breakthroughs or influencing students in subtle but profound ways, researchers and educators are proving that little things can make a big impact. Parents often get a jump on formal instruction when it comes to language and literacy by reading to their toddlers and teaching the alphabet before their kids ever set foot in a classroom. But getting a head start on mathematics is often restricted to teaching children to count. When educators and parents create opportunities for mathematical engagement in day-to-day activities, then children will experience mathematics not just as a skill or a tool, but as a way of thinking and being in the world. Look at the math interactions you are already having in your daily routines. Preschools do a wonderful job with lots of different skills, be it social skills or literacy, but math is often neglected. Part of the reason is that a lot of preschool teachers are not familiar with what they could be doing. A preschool classroom is a place to play, so we don't want them just sitting and doing math activities. Teachers should be aided to recognize the potential in the activities they are already doing.
Everyday activities like finding a matching pair of shoes can be an occasion for learning about sorting and comparing, for example, while other regular occurrences like lining up for recess can introduce concepts like ordinal numbers, such as first and second, or spatial language such as before, beside, between and behind. Math can be fun, but fun can also be math
Playtime is also rife with opportunities to explore mathematical concepts in an enjoyable way, whether it's making shapes with popsicle sticks, doing puzzles or choosing books for storytime that involve patterns or numbers, or singing songs that involve counting. Remember that math isn't just about numbers There is an assumption that mathematics starts with numbers. If you're really good in counting, then later algorithms and computation, you'll be really good in mathematics generally. But research suggests that spatial reasoning the ability to mentally manipulate spatial objects and images - is an equally valuable skill in mathematics, yet is sometimes overlooked in elementary and secondary classrooms. What are some of the things we could do to make more activities related to spatial reasoning? One of the main tasks is to be able to rotate things in your mind. Or, in early childhood, it might mean we show you a square and a triangle put together, then we cover it up and you have to draw it. Children who have good visual memory like that aren't only successful in certain spatial things; they are successful in numbers as well. Source: https://phys.org/news/2016-03-fun-mathematics-early-life-professor.html By Amod Kulkarni MMS (2016-18)
Quant Connect December 2016 Quantinuum, the Quant forum of KJ Somaiya Institute of Management Studies and Research aims to empower students and professionals alike to organize and understand numbers and, in turn, to make good and rational decisions as future managers. The newsletter published monthly consists of a gamut of articles for readers ranging from beginners to advanced learners so as to further enrich the young minds understand the contributions made to the field of mathematics along with a couple of brain- racking sections of Sudoku to tickle the gray cells. For any further queries and feedback, please contact the following address: KJ Somaiya Institute of Management Studies and Research, Vidya Nagar, VidyaVihar, Ghatkopar East, Mumbai -400077 Mentor Prof. N.S.Nilakantan (+919820680741) – Email – nilakantan@somaiya.edu
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Editorial Team:
Rupal Doshi (+919831427640) Amod Kulkarni (+919833701015) Maheshwaran Kumar (+919566173411) Aditi Mehta (+91 97570 99599) Arunava Dey (+917720093053) Anish Sagar (+919981944441) Milcah George (+917406186087)
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