User:STrefzer/Lorien Pratt

Lorien Pratt is the Chief Scientist of Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence company, Quantellia. In her own words, Lorien is a, "Machine Learning and Decision Intelligence pioneer, author, speaker, consultant, coder, strategist, nice person"!

Current Focus

Dr. Pratt is working with clients across industries, using her extensive expertise in Decision Intelligence to help them answer the critical question of, "If I make this decision today, how will it impact my objectives tomorrow"? In her role as Chief Scientist of Quantellia, she designs, codes and deploys machine learning and decision intelligence software and services. Machine Learning brings power to big data, allowing clients to bridge to business value, including customer experience, revenues, and cost savings. Dr. Pratt is a machine learning pioneer, and has delivered applied machine learning solutions since 1988. A powerfully impactful innovator, Dr. Pratt is a thought leader and author. She wrote Link: How Decision Intelligence Connects Data, Actions, and Outcomes for a Better World, co-edited Learning to Learn, and leads machine learning and decision intelligence innovation at Quantellia.

Education

Pratt studied computer science at Dartmouth College and Rutgers University, earning her Masters and Ph.D at the latter. Dr. Pratt's Ph.D Thesis of 1993 is titled, Transferring previously learned back-propagation neural networks to new learning tasks.

• M.S., Computer Science, Rutgers University, 5/88.

• A.B., Computer Science, Dartmouth College, 5/83.

Philosophy

Lorien Pratt is the Chief Scientist and cofounder of Quantellia. She has been promoting decision intelligence (DI) and machine learning (ML), in a number of ways over the years, including through her upcoming book Link,  the DI News page, the DI LinkedIn group, the World Modeler blog , videos on the DI YouTube site, and more. Dr. Pratt states in her blog,

"If you’ve read this far, you’ve probably already got a notion of why decision intelligence and/or  is important to you.

• Maybe you’re a machine learning coder who’s got an instinct that there are lots of ways that your work can be used which go beyond the marketing, advertising, and recommendation engine “usual suspects”.  Or maybe you’re looking for a more structured way to help your clients figure out how ML fits into their business. DI does both of these things.
• Maybe you’re a government policy maker who feels that those Machine Learning people probably have something valuable to contribute, but you need some help structuring your situation into a form that will allow data and evidence to play a part.
• Maybe you’re a visionary, who understands that the great problems of the world remain unsolved because, in part, we are stuck in a way of thinking about them that is fundamentally limited.
• Perhaps you understand that we must shift how we solve complex problems from Broca’s Area: an “alpha software” part of the brain that’s really limited in its computational power compared to visual and motor centers.
• Or you might be an educator, who understands that systems thinking is the most important “literacy” of the 21st century.

My goal is to serve you all, and more, and to help to “connect the dots” both horizontally between domains (such as from education to health, climate, and energy) as well as vertically between modalities: up and down the data stack as well as up from an understanding of the brain, through how we work together, to how to create laws and policies, to how we solve the most intractable problems.

It’s a bit contradictory to be writing, in text, about a new communication and collaboration medium that is so fundamentally different than text. But there’s a method to the madness: my goal is to lead you down a path, from this text mode that is familiar today, across to the interactive, graphical, visual/motor world of interactive decision modeling.

We won’t throw away text along the way, but we’ll increasingly integrate it with an approach that encourages “connected up” thinking. It’s the only way forward. So grab a cup of coffee, and let’s get going!"

Creating impact through innovation

This is what one of Lorien's colleagues has to say about her work ethic and impact. "Lorien is among the smartest, hardest-working people I have ever had the pleasure to work with. Her incredibly deep technical knowledge is exceeded by her ability to communicate highly complex concepts clearly -- and to tie them back to clients' tactical and strategic challenges. Her pioneering work in machine learning and decision intelligence provides immense value to Quantellia's clients and multiplies their ability to add value for their own customers."

Lorien and the Quantellia team's impact upon the world speaks for itself with 45 projects, 7x the industry-standard AI project success rate, $100 million in US Federal spending managed by their formulas over 32 years of providing machine learning solutions.

Thought Leadership

•C-SPAN2 Book TV - Lorien Pratt discussed the next level of artificial intelligence that involves decision making.

•Computer America podcast-

•Tech Nation interview What's beyond Machine Learning and AI?

•NPR Marketplace interview- Hunting for the Holy Grail of Digital Language Translation.

•Responsible AI/DI Summit (2018 + 2019)

•MCubed- Agile applied AI, a new discipline. I want to inspire you in two new directions. AI at scale. It's so new we don't even have a name for it yet...

•Ethical Corp article •Prowler