A friend sent me Safi Bahcall’s book “Loonshots: How to Nurture the Crazy Ideas that Win Wars, Cure Disease, and Transform Industries” a couple of months ago. It’s a fascinating book with many interesting ideas and stories, the most important of which is (arguably) the Innovation Equation, a model that seeks to explain, in a … More Safi Bahcall’s Innovation Equation
I was recently asked a question on what are the weaknesses of Agile as a framework, and what do we have to do to work around those weaknesses. This is a real if somewhat unusual question, and I can imagine many people who grew up with traditional waterfall project-management methodologies asking that question from time … More Agile, Waterfall, Wagile, and All That
I recently concluded a two-year stint managing a team of ten highly skilled analytics professionals spread across three different locations. There were of course many challenges but the team over-achieved on just about every measure of success one can imagine. The team’s wins include completing on-time and under-budget a data-matching project that delivers tens of … More Agile Data Science: A Portfolio Approach to Managing An Analytics Team
Many of my most successful data science projects happen by accident. You know, the little skunkworks that arose from a serendipitous hallway conversation where an important and urgent business problem meets a half-baked analytical idea. With a suitable dash of data and the right mix of office politics and corporate kung fu, a baby data-science … More Agile Data Science: On Opportunism
Organisations with immature delivery capabilities can become debt-laden very quickly. There are many forms these debts can take. We are all familiar with financial debt, which comes primarily from unchecked over-investment. There is also technical debt, which is incurred when organisations take engineering short-cuts to attempt to achieve results faster than what is sustainable. Governance debt … More Organisational Debts
Slightly less than 5 years ago, I had the fortune of being hauled in front of the then richest man in Asia and asked to talk about data science. That was the very first time I had met a billionaire in person so it was kind of exciting. Two things happened: I gave my worst … More Agile Data Science: The Point of It All
The life of a sea squirt has an important lesson for data science. For those who haven’t heard, sea squirts come to life as larvae that swim freely around. In that state, however, they are not capable of feeding so they will soon settle to the bottom of the ocean and cement themselves headfirst to … More Agile Data Science: Start with An Action
I had a chance to visit Westpac in early May as part of our agency’s Know Your Industry initiative. In that two days, we met with leaders from across the Westpac Group and it’s quite amazing to see how the Agile mindset has penetrated every corner of the banking group and become a part of … More Agile Retail Banking
Combating terrorist financing
My Irrational Life
Updates on my research and expository papers, discussion of open problems, and other maths-related topics. By Terence Tao
Mental Models 4 Life 