Retailers know it is crucial to optimize the timing and promotion of sales to maximize profit. But how do you process the large amounts of data necessary to determine optimal pricing and timing? Left to the intuition of product managers, retailers risk missing out, but a new method created by Georgia Perakis and her team of PhD students in collaboration with Oracle RGBU, aims to change that. Using models that analyze price effects, promotion effects, and general consumer behavior data, this approach has the potential to help retailers increase their profits by an average of 3-10 percent. In a world of slim profit margins and ever-increasing competition, this could be a game changer for retailers in any industry.
Today’s consumers are better equipped with access to information than any in history, but we don’t always use that information at critical moments. By leveraging the power of augmented reality and the techniques that advertisers use to influence consumers, our personal devices can become personal coaches, not only helping inform our decisions but helping improve our decisions. By playing an expanded role in day-to-day decision-making, smart phones and wearable technologies can encourage consumers towards less impulsive, more deliberate, and ultimately more satisfying choices.
Empowered by ubiquitous information technology, the generation that has come of age in the digital era has learned a very different consumer experience than their parents. From media and financial services to hospitality and transportation, Millennials expect flexibility and responsiveness across sectors to customize their transactions to fit their needs as individuals. Those expectations may only grow as the exchange of data between consumers and sellers continues expanding, fostering even greater personalization through the emergence of bioproducts.
Today’s consumers want to know more about the goods they purchase and where they come from than ever before. Concerns over issues like fair trade and sustainability are driving many companies, from fledgling startups to industry mainstays, toward radical transparency around sourcing, yet this move isn’t just about brand management. Case studies from the apparel, food, and electronics industries reveal the benefits of better visualization and greater transparency for the whole supply chain, because you can’t improve what you can’t see — but it can still cost you.
Manufacturing and production of invented products have been demonstrated as key to a sustained innovation ecosystem. Here, we will discuss recent analysis of local, regional, and national activities that support manufacturing innovation and workforce development. This includes U.S. efforts including the National Network for Manufacturing Innovation and Advanced Technological Education programs that can reduce the barrier to commercialization of new and important technologies, as well as contrasting efforts in other regions of the world.
MIT Media Lab founder Nicholas Negroponte takes you on a journey through the last 30 years of tech. The consummate predictor highlights interfaces and innovations he foresaw in the 1970s and 1980s that were scoffed at then but are ubiquitous today. And he leaves you with one last (absurd? brilliant?) prediction for the coming 30 years.
Growing evidence supports a critical role of metal-coordination complex crosslinking in soft biological material properties such as underwater adhesion and self-healing. Given their exploitation in such desirable material applications in nature, bio-inspired metal-coordinate complex crosslinking no doubt provides unique possibilities to further advance synthetic polymer materials engineering. Using bio-inspired metal-binding polymers, initial efforts to mimic these material properties have shown promise. In addition, novel opportunities for new fundamental insights on how hierarchical polymer network mechanics can be strongly coupled to supramolecular crosslink dynamics are also emerging. Early lessons from studies of these hierarchical chemo-mechanical couplings will be presented.
Understanding the brain could lead to new kinds of computational algorithms and artificial intelligences, as well as treatments for intractable disorders that affect over a billion people worldwide. However, the brain is a very complex, densely wired circuit, and understanding how it works has remained elusive. In order to map how these circuits are organized, and control their complex dynamics, we are building new tools, which include methods for physically expanding brain circuits so that we can see their building blocks, as well as molecules that make neural circuits controllable by light. Through these tools we aim to enable the systematic analysis and repair of the brain.
From flexible hybrid electronics, to integrated photonic devices, to functional fibers to smart manufacturing, the new U.S. Federal government institutes are advancing new manufacturing technologies and accelerating the pace of manufacturing innovation. This session will review MIT's involvement in these institutes and discuss opportunities for industry partners to participate in developing new products and capabilities.