Center for Optimization under Uncertainty Research - overview
Motivated by trends across industries and by advances in analytics and cognitive, the mission of The Center for Optimization under Uncertainty Research (COUR, pronounced "kor") is to fuel innovation around sophisticated solutions and algorithms for optimizing decisions that need to be made across many industries and strategic areas when non-negligible uncertainty is present. We seek to provide a scientific basis, together with fundamental research in the relevant fields of mathematics, to address the complex challenges of learning, reasoning, optimizing and controlling decision making and planning under uncertainty, risks and associated tradeoffs.
Some of the relevant industries include Agriculture, Airlines, Commerce, Education, Energy, Genomics, Healthcare, Natural Resources, Pharmaceuticals, Software, Trading, and Transportation. Moreover, a wide variety of business problems, such as Workforce and Sales-Performance Management, are relevant across many industries and have many uncertain inputs. In all of these examples and numerous others, the decision-making objectives can span a broad spectrum including growth, revenue, health, brand, reputation, innovation, quality, productivity, efficiency, effectiveness, client satisfaction, or combinations thereof.
COUR will leverage IBM's world-class research in mathematical optimization under uncertainty and our world-class domain expertise in industries and strategic areas in order to drive IBM's research agenda in optimization under uncertainty in connection with key industry applications. Our overall goals are to render significant business impact for driving revenue and managing risks and cost, while remaining famous for our science in the related fields of mathematics.
Through and associated with COUR, our primary efforts will be a set of key research projects and client engagements across various industry pillars and over our worldwide labs. The end result will be cognitive decisions and strategies that revolutionize business, society and many aspects of our world by improving the control and management of processes under uncertainty, risks and volatility and reducing the negative impact of such phenomena.