Name: Sumeet Patnaik

Roll number: uemf15029

About the Speaker

Professor Richard C. Larson

Dr. Larson received his Ph.D. from MIT where he is Mitsui Professor in the
Engineering Systems Division (ESD). He is currently founding director of the
MITs new Center for Engineering System Fundamentals. He is author, coauthor or editor of six books and author of over 85 scientific articles, primarily
in the fields of urban service systems (esp. emergency response systems),
queueing, logistics, disaster management, disease dynamics, dynamic pricing
of critical infrastructures, education and workforce planning. He has worked
closely with a wide variety of organizations, includingin the private sector
banks, airlines, retailers, industrial gas distributors, amusement parks, andin
the public sectorthe City of New York, many public school systems, the U.S.
Postal Service, the World Bank, the Centers for Disease Control, the National
Institutes of Health, and numerous police departments. At MIT he has founded
several
initiatives,
including MIT
Learning
International
Networks
Consortium and MIT Blended Learning Open Source Science or Math Studies.
Dr. Larson is a member of the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) and co
-chairs a major panel on the application of systems engineering to health,
cosponsored by the NAE and the Institute of Medicine.

Move

Over, Big Data! How Small Simple Models Can

Yield Big Insights by Professor Richard C Larson
Brief Summary
Dr. Larson in his presentation, discussed about how simple
mathematical models and small relationships of systems can help to
improve ones perception and lead to better decision making and how it
can help to guide the analysis with big data sets and simple always give
you the strategy and how big data and small models go hand in hand
together. In his presentation, he has cited certain examples from his
professional research and consulting engagements, and discussed

general applications to industry.

With big data there is seamless data coming in so there should be some
knowledge of it, there should be a prior analysis and focus where and
what we need then we can achieve our goals. We need a strategy to
extract decision relevant information out of a dataset
The speaker mentions that fetching a data is like fishing in a big ocean
and there should be right strategy and simple data models, there are
ideas that big data trends now are too discounted and have very less
importance.
He has covered on
Flaws of Averages what they are and how to avoid them.
Square root laws - how to apply them to locating facilities and more
Nonlinearities in QueueingLateral thinkingand how it can sometimes make a problem go away.
Case study marrying small models with big data analysis
FLAWS OF AVERAGES
This video presents an introduction to the Flaws of Averages using some
exciting examples like the crossing of the river example, the
cookie example, and friends on Facebook example.
If we are about to deal with lots of data, averages will be
important. We need to be savvy customers of averages!!!
Averages are often worthwhile representations of a set of data by a
single descriptive number. The objective of this module, however, is to
simply point out a few drawbacks that could arise if one is not attentive
to details when calculating and interpreting averages. This video talks
about three flaws of averages:
(1) The average is not always a good description of the actual
situation,
(2) The function of the average is not always the same as the
average of the function, and
(3) The average depends on your perspective.
The idea is to get the students to think about averages in their everyday
lives, how averages assist in our understanding and how they can be
misleading. This gets STEM thinking outside of the classroom and into
everyday experiences. It should engage the students for many hours.
Consider a case where the average may not always be a good
description of the real situation!
1st flaw of averages
That depending on the situation, the average may be exactly the
same, but the distribution may be different. For example, think of the
crossing of the river. We had the flat line, we had the sloped line, we had
the sort of double table top line. Both of those were essentially three
different distributions that all have the same average value. So those

are the kinds of things that we were thinking are flaw of averages.
Second flaw of averages, that the function of the average is not
always the same as the average of the function.
For example, we had plate A with two cookies and plate B with two
cookies, where the average diameter for plate A of the two cookies was
7 cm and the average diameter of the two cookies on plate B was 8 cm.
And as Rhonda helped us beautifully illustrate, intuitively you would
think that the plate B set of cookies would be bigger in terms of area
since the diameter is bigger. But as you saw, the cookies on plate A
were actually bigger when we uncovered them. So that was just a nice
way to illustrate this point that the function of the average is not always
the same as the average of the function.
Last flaw of averages: The average depends on your perspective
For Example-:
Now Lake Woebegone is a fictional town from a radio program here in
the US, and one of the key phrases about Lake Woebegone is that all of
the children are above average. Now this may sound like an impossible
statement, but again it all depends on your point of view. If the average
that youre discussing is a national average, it could be possible that
Lake Woebegones children could all be above average.
THE SQUARE ROOT LAW:
If the distance travelled by the police car is considered than in a
graphical representation it might be actually greater what it is to be
represented so the square root law helps us in getting the correct data.
In the above example if A is the service area and N is number of police
cars than the Distance (D) is directly proportional to the Sq root of the
area of the police car. In big data we might need to look at this type of
special data.
NONLINEARITIES IN QUEUEING
Richard C Larson in his presentation, discussed about Queueing
that
A queue is a waiting line
Uncertainties cause delays
Usually there is uncertainty in:
The arrival times of customers
The service requirements of customers
The urgency with which a customer must be served.
Some Familiar Queues:
Fast food restaurants, Toll booths, Retail shopping, Airports, Automatic
Teller Machines, waiting lists for college acceptance, on hold to an Toll
free number
It is a basic engineering or mathematics that effectively helps in
management of the queuing system. Today there are large number of
files and big data helps us in analysing the queues.
The littles law helps us in analysing the queuing system with the help

of the equation:
L= W
L= time avg number of customer
Lambda: avg rate of arrivals
W: Mean time Spent
MMK queuing: In this type as the fraction of time the server gets busy
as close to 100% the queuing delay explodes so the managers must
manage it in a way so that there is a delay or an idle time of the server
else there can be a queuing explosion. So if there are many servers
which are working 95% of the time and if can manage the queuing delay
then it is very critical to have an estimate for the Lambda which we can
get from the analysis of big data , If there is a difference in 5%then the
queuing can go higher which might cause a distortion. If we make
everything deterministic there can be no queuing delay at all.
Performances degrade as the arrival rate increases or mean
service time increases.
Performance degrades as the variance of time between arrivals
increases or variance of service time increases.
There are queues everywhere and it is important to have them in-order
to maintain a good and optimum service level.
Case Study: A personal big data Small Model Experience
How can we differentiate if people were there in the queue or not in the
queue? : So the queuing had to be decided and the signature of the
queue was important. The signature of the queue was of the session
after which when the card was inserted. There is a gap between each
session during the queuing process.
Queue Inference Engine is a mathematical algorithm used to derive
results regarding queue statistics like
mean wait in queue, time-dependent mean number in queue, and
probability distribution of the number in queue observed by a randomly
arriving customer. The queueing behaviour of Poisson arrival queueing
systems from only the transactional data and the Poisson assumption.
For each congestion period in which queues may form (in front of a
single or multiple servers) are estimated.
Richard C. Larson here provides us with a real life case study when he
was approached by BayBank (headquarters in US which performs
several commercial banking operations) who were struggling to know
how many ATM machines should they place and to find the
balance between fully functional and limited functional ATM machine.
Fully functional ATM machine are those were you can carry even deposit
cash while limited functional ATM machine can only facilitate withdrawal
of cash. They provided Mr. Larson with reams and reams of data which
the author describes as almost "3 feet high pages of data in his desk.
This case is in 1989 when Big data was not much known. Each line of

data has up to second data of when the customer inserted its card and
the service commenced till when the transaction was completed and the
service terminated for each customer. If the card was inserted 2-5
minutes after the previous service was over, then there was a gap. Thus
it was important to partition customers based on who and how many
were in the queue during congestion period and how many were not in
queue. This would have helped Mr.Larson to estimate how many ATM
machines could be installed by Baybank and the balance between both.
First, people come to an ATM machine in random process i.e. Poisson
Process. Now Mr.Larson tried to mathematically impose small models
in big data (loads of data provided by BayBank). Thus they came up
with a new mathematically correct algorithm to determine
statistics of customer queue without any monitoring devices like camera
or sensor. The author developed a novel O(n^3 ) algorithm which uses
those data to deduce transient
queue lengths as well as the waiting times of each customer in the busy
period.
For example: -if there are 17 customers in a queue, then amount of work
that is to be done goes by 17^3.There are also other mathematical
deductions done in the paper Larson, R.C., "The Queue Inference
Engine: Deducing Queue Statistics from Transactional Data."
In this case, small models were must for the algorithm on Big Data that
was deduced. Thus as the author states by marrying small models
and Big data, it was possible to deduce queue statistics. This paper of
Marson was also appreciated by Simchi-Levi. This case study can also be
expanded to other examples or fields like invisible queues in
communication systems(many communication systems have finite
queues during congestion period have invisible long queues of
customers outside the system waiting to gain access of the system) or
traffic queued at intersections or other queuing networks.