Webinar series
This webinar series shares examples of how others are using Analytica to further their work. The intention of the series is to highlight models of all shapes and sizes, spanning various industries and needs. You will also find webinars from top decision makers showcasing model and decision analysis best practices.
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July 6th at 11 a.m. PT
Crossing frontiers: the dawn of a new era in artificial intelligence (AI) & machine learning (ML) with Lonnie Chrisman
“Crossing frontiers” aims not only to inform but to spark a thoughtful conversation around the dual-edged nature of AI and ML. As we celebrate the remarkable strides made in these fields, it is also crucial to reflect on the responsibilities we bear as custodians of technology, safeguarding our future while embracing the dawn of this new era.
Lonnie Chrisman, PhD. is the Chief Technology Officer (CTO) at Lumina and will be hosting this webinar. Lonnie heads the engineering and development of Analytica. He has authored dozens of refereed publications in the areas of machine learning, artificial intelligence planning, robotics, probabilistic inference, Bayesian networks, and computational biology. In 1977, when he was in the eighth grade, he had his first paid programming job and built his own personal computer. In 1987, he was awarded the Alton B. Zerby award, “Most outstanding Electrical Engineering Student in the USA”. Lonnie has a PhD in artificial intelligence and computer science from Carnegie Mellon University and a BS in electrical engineering from University of California, Berkeley.
Navigating the Heat Pump Landscape: Helping Consumers, Utilities and Cities Make Economic Decisions
See how the City of Fort Collins, Lumina Decision Systems, and Apex Analytics are helping to affordably decarbonize buildings by making better decisions about which electrification technologies to pursue.
Many cities and states are adopting aggressive climate goals, requiring concerted action on the part of utilities, cities, and residents to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Lumina and Apex have developed a tool based on the National Standard Practice Manual (NSPM) guidance to help optimize cost-effectiveness of building electrification programs, including calculation of marginal cost of CO2 abatement. This tool was used to prioritize and improve new residential building electrification measures. Research also showed the importance of filling gaps in customer and contractor knowledge of heat pumps.
The panelist of experts, include:
- James Milford, Director of Consulting with Lumina
- Justin Spencer, Project Director with Apex Analytics
- Brian Tholl, Energy Services Supervisor with the City of Fort Collins, Colorado
Quantifying Regional Methane Emissions in the New Mexico Permian Basin through a Comprehensive Aerial Survey with Yulia Chen & Evan Sherwin
Methane is a potent greenhouse gas and the primary constituent of natural gas. Improving gas conservation practices throughout the oil and gas supply chain presents a great opportunity for methane emissions mitigation. Recently, aerial screening of methane point sources has made regional comprehensive surveys possible.
In this study, we leverage a comprehensive aerial survey of the New Mexico Permian Basin, finding that a relatively small number of high-impact super-emitting events drive total emissions. Our Monte Carlo simulation, implemented in Analytica, provides rigorous statistical treatment of these highly consequential, low-frequency, often intermittent emission sources while accounting for measurement uncertainty. Accounting for these uncertainties, our estimate is significantly higher than the estimate from the official US Greenhouse Gas Inventory (GHGI). This suggests that aerial measurement campaigns can find key emissions that are missed in previous methods, flagging this small number of highly consequential sources for quick repair.
How the Heat Pump Evaluation Model was Built with Lumina's Senior Consultant Hadi Eshraghi
Join Lumina’s Senior Consultant Hadi Eshraghi as he explains how the heat pump model was built. Hadi was one of the main developers on the heat pump calculator.
You can follow along as he walks through the inner workings of the model and what decisions were made in its creation. This project was made possible by the partnership with the Central Coast Community Energy (3CE) through their Electrification Education Grant.
Try out the heat pump evaluation tool aka calculator.
How Utilities Get the Most Bang for their Buck in Reducing Risks With Max Henrion & Sam Savage
Max Henrion, PhD, CEO of Lumina and Sam Savage, PhD, Executive Director of ProbabilityManagement.org will explain the Risk Spend Efficiency (RSE) framework, how California utilities have been using it, and illustrate RSE with ANAGRAM (Analytica for Natural Gas Risk Analysis and Management).
The California Public Utilities Commission requires utilities to quantify risks and use risk-spend efficiency (RSE) to prioritize mitigations based on how much risk they reduce per dollar invested. In this webinar you will see how California utilities use this framework and illustrate the approach with ANAGRAM.
Max and Sam both advise the California Public Utility Commission on the Risk Decision Framework used by California electric and gas utilities.
Using Analytica to Model Farm Financial Risk
Richard Preston and Cory Walters explain how they are using Analytica to help the farming community.
Farmers have always been exposed to risk. Yields are uncertain; prices are uncertain. In the past most agricultural education had been geared toward maximizing income. Decisions were made by comparing averages of different management choices. In today’s uncertain world, it is time to think about risk. Analytica provides the perfect platform for Agricultural Economists to explore the tradeoff between risk and profit at the farm level.
How to use Analytica Cloud Platform (ACP) to its full potential
ACP lets you deploy Analytica models as powerful web applications. ACP offers user-interface features, like tabs, embedded tables and charts, not (yet) available in Analytica on the desktop. We have continued to add new features including a new ACP Style library, which allows for a variety of options when customizing your models. In this webinar, Max Henrion, Lumina’s CEO, will demo these features in some compelling examples, and show you how to use the ACP Style library.
Additional Resources & Examples:
Heat Pumps 101: Heat and Cool your Home While Saving Energy and Reducing Emissions!
This webinar will go over the basics of heat pumps and highlight the most common heat pump technologies on the market. The talk will also go over the latest rebates through the State of California (where you can save thousands of dollars per unit installed) and how to apply for them. We will also have a local heat pump installer as a panelist so you can ask a pro your questions about what to actually expect during an install!
We will also demo our new Heat Pump Evaluation Tool – an online calculator that tells you how much money and emissions you can save by switching from conventional heating/cooling systems to electric heat pumps.
The webinar will be hosted by Krista Myers (she/her), M.S. in Geology and Geophysics, and a B.S. in Earth and Planetary Science with seven years of climate change research experience, and she volunteers with local climate action organizations.
Decision Making When There Is Little Historic Precedent
Lonnie focuses on how computers can help you improve decision making and strategic planning in novel situations. For example, you might evaluate a new initiative or proposed policy that has never been tried before. Or the future world may change as a result of emerging technologies, a pandemic, climate change, or new regulations. Without historic precedent, you cannot simply extrapolate from the past, thus limiting the effectiveness of BI, data analysis and machine learning tools. Decision makers often find it challenging to develop a core understanding of key issues, core objectives and options, complex tradeoffs, and incomplete information and uncertainty. Different stakeholders are prone to adopt advocacy positions, which then hampers communication and rationality. Lonnie leads the design and development of Analytica, a software tool designed to address these types of challenges and proven successful, through the promotion of transparent model-based decision making. He will discuss how its unique design promotes clarity and insight.
Green Accountability and Incentives: Reflecting the Social and Economic Cost of CO2 in New Capital Projects Using Analytica with Robert Brown
Robert Brown is the Senior Strategic Analyst at Novelis Inc. the World leader in aluminum products, with significant market share in beverage can, automotive, aerospace, and specialties applications. Robert works on financial planning, risk analysis, and business case analysis. He is a decision science advisor, author, and experienced Analytica user. Novelis aims to become the leading provider of low-carbon, sustainable aluminum solutions, working to move the industry and society towards a circular economy. Robert and team need to justify the impact of their dollars spent across a range of objectives, including product performance and profitability. In this presentation you will see how Novelis prices the economic cost of CO2 emissions. You will see a broad range of Analytica capabilities including influence diagrams to outline the conceptual framework, dynamic simulation to develop a proxy price distribution to burden CO2 production, and Monte Carlo to test uncertain tradeoffs among strategic alternatives.Proyectos y Creación de Valor (September 15, 2021)
Toda organización requiere siempre de nuevas destrezas, productos, servicios, un cambio en ellos, o en ella misma. Por todo ello, hoy los proyectos son parte de la vida cotidiana de los ejecutivos y organizaciones.
En este webinar veremos cómo insertar y tratar las incertidumbres que existen a futuro y plasmarlas en un Flujo de Caja no determinístico usando diferentes distribuciones de probabilidad para obtener el VPN Esperado y hacer un análisis probabilístico. Siendo que todo es a futuro, no puede ser determinista.
Applied Real Options Analysis for the Finance and Decision Professional (Aug 25, 2021)
Dan Zoppo, finance professional and expert Analytica user, gave a talk about the simple yet flexible and powerful Least Squares Monte Carlo method. This talk discussed what real options are, why we should be interested in them, and how to solve real options problems in practice. Also, Dan kindly shared his Analytica model and slides on his blog, Freehold Finance.
Real options represent managerial decisions and operational flexibilities that can contribute significant value to a business in response to market and operational uncertainties that unfold over time. While finance academics have long promoted real options analysis as superior to static discounted cash flow analysis it is only with the advent of modern computing and algorithms that real options can take their place in the finance and decision professional’s toolkit. This method is an approximate dynamic programming approach that has been used to value a diverse range of assets including natural resource investments, energy generation and storage assets, pharmaceutical R&D, and real estate.
Making jet fuel from the sun and wind: when will it be cost effective?
Dr. Evan Sherwin, Stanford Postdoctoral Research Fellow, discusses his research (and Analytica model) to answer the question: when will it be cost effective to make jet fuel from sun and wind?
As the energy system moves toward variable renewable electricity, sectors such as aviation may require energy-dense low-carbon liquid fuels to dramatically reduce emissions. Electrofuels, synthesized from CO2 from direct air capture and hydrogen from electrolysis of water, powered primarily by solar or wind electricity, may present a cost-effective path forward. However, this approach will require operating capital-intensive equipment using variable renewable electricity. Dr. Sherwin employed an optimization-based techno-economic analysis, implemented in Analytica, to assess the prospects for large cost reductions, accounting for changes in optimal system operation as component technologies advance.
Modelos de Inversion y Medidas de Riesgo con el metodo Monte Carlo (May 27, 2021)
Dr. Jorge Muro Arbulu presentó sobre el uso del análisis de monte carlo usando Analytica.
Cuando invertimos en un activo, necesariamente hay incertidumbres a futuro, pero con el método Monte Carlo de Analytica podemos cuantificar las distintas métricas de riesgo de nuestra inversión: Probabilidad de pérdida, Volatilidad o Desviación Estándar, Valor en Riesgo o VaR, y Déficit Esperado (o Expected Shortfall) con 10 mil simulaciones (como requiere el acuerdo de Basilea 3) con facilidad.
Aquí construimos un modelo de inversión inmobiliaria y luego explicamos y extraemos las mencionadas métricas del riesgo inherentes a nuestra inversión.
The Value of Knowing How Little You Know: When to leave for the plane (April 22, 2021)
What time should you leave to catch a plane flight? We all know intuitively to leave extra time for traffic and other uncertainties. But, how much time? And what’s the value of considering uncertainty? Max Henrion gave a talk on April 22, 2021 where he introduced the Expected Value of Including Uncertainty (EVIU), compare with the Expected Value of Perfect Information (EVPI), and the insights it gives into a variety of decision problems — including catching a plane. He’ll share the Analytica model.
Inteligencia Artificial en los Negocios (April 15, 2021)
Jorge Muro Arbulu, PhD. gave a wonderful talk titled Inteligencia Artificial como desarrollo de negocios in Spanish. A translation is Artificial Intelligence as business development. Inteligencia Artificial y aplicaciones en los negocios, con ejemplos desarrollados o a desarrollar en Operaciones, Proyectos, y Finanzas.