Léa Déléris

Léa Déléris IBM Research Staff Member and Manager, Dublin Research Lab, Dublin, Ireland

Presentation slides

Title: Enabling Decisions : Cognitive technologies to bridge the gap between Theory and Practice 

Abstract: To a large extent, decision making support remains the domain of specialists. While academia has made significant progress in modeling and solving complex decision situations, the general population is no closer to making use of such solutions in business and personal decisions, except when the problem faced neatly matches an existing template. There are multiple reasons why sophisticated decision making is not accessible: modeling the decision problem, framing it so as to define the alternatives, objectives, constraints and preferences is not a simple task, nor is understanding which modeling framework might apply and then possibly to choose among multiple such relevant frameworks. In fact, academia and industry alike are actively looking into such research directions. In this presentation, we provide examples of how applied interdisciplinary research, leveraging advances in artificial intelligence broadly defined, can provide solutions to bridge the gap between theory and practice and eventually bring rigorous decision making to the masses.

Biography: I received M.S. degrees in Economic Systems from Ecole Polytechnique (France) in 1999 and in Management Science and Engineering from Stanford University in 2001. I joined IBM Research in 2006 just after graduating from Stanford University with a PhD. in Management Science and Engineering.

I currently manage a team of 10+ researchers and software engineers working on a diversity of projects that seek to make use of artificial intelligence and natural language processing to support decision making in a variety of situations including social care, health care, chemistry but also sales management. I am also the manager for the Irish team of the Debater project. Altogether, our work led to 5 patents filed and 30 publications accepted since January 2014.

I have been a Research Staff Member and Manager in IBM Ireland since April 2010. One of my previous roles was to lead the Risk Management Collaboratory project (see Projects). Before moving to Ireland, I was a member of the Risk Analytics group of the Business Application and Mathematical Science Department at the IBM TJ Watson Research Center.

My personal research interests lie in decision theory and risk analysis. Currently, my work presents a mixture of applied and conceptual work, including (i) leveraging natural language processing techniques to facilitate the retrieval of risk information and its aggregation into decision support models, (ii) applications of analytics to help care workers make better decisions in the social care domain and (iii) value of information within decision problem with uncertainty.

In the past, I have been involved in defining risk analysis models in the context of enterprises such as supply chain risk, process model risk modeling, distributed elicitation of expert opinions. For instance, I have worked on the problem of defining the long-term maintenance plan of oil platforms for Statoil, a Norwegian oil producer. http://researcher.watson.ibm.com/researcher/view.php?person=ie-lea.deleris