You heard correctly. Target is successfully navigating the “retail is dead” — or at least drastically evolving — era. Professor Srikant Datar’s recent case study unpacks how Target went from data rich, but insights poor to lucratively leveraging the information it was collecting. You could say, Target’s in the retail and data business now.

How do we know if social enterprises and impact investors are actually improving low-income consumers' lives? We listen. Or at least, Acumen’s Lean Data team does. So far, they’ve had conversations with over 70,000 people in 27 countries to help inform future investment decisions.

While satellites may be some of our most impressive technology, they are bogged down by a single bottleneck — data. Satellites orbiting Earth routinely struggle to relay data back down to Earth in a timely manner, with sizable implications for the real world, on the ground economy. This is why companies like Analytical Space are hoping to tap into the big data space revolution that is just waiting to happen.

Machine learning is a popular topic in most industries these days, and it will come as no surprise that this is true for astronomy and astrophysics as well. University of Colorado PhD student Avery Schiff explores how a deep learning algorithm is being used to classify galaxy morphologies in this article from graduate student astronomy journal Astrobites.

It’s a declaration we’ve all heard before: “We need more collaboration! We need to break out of our silos and build integrated, cross-functional teams!” But what if — when it comes to collaboration — there can be too much of a good thing? This is the hypothesis Professor Jeff Polzer set out to test with his research on collaborative overload, that is how the amount of collaboration relates to organizational productivity. Using digital trace data to analyze organizational productivity at scale, Professor Polzer finds some answers that may surprise you.

Fresno Unified School District had built a robust data-collection system, but none of it was being put to use. That is, until Harvard Strategic Data Project Fellow David Jansen developed a app that turned improving student outcomes into a compelling game.

Women are more likely than men to drop out of data science classes when they receive a low score in an early assignment. The Coursera team shares how they’re using targeted interventions to tackle this trend and help close the gender gap in STEM.

As the largest online learning platform for higher education, Coursera has global scale. In this flash talk from our 2018 Future Assembly, Head of Data Science Emily Glassberg Sand shares how she and her team of data scientists harness data from millions of participants to enhance learner outcomes and deliver personalized, targeted recommendations on everything from suggested courses to difficult problems.

Technology is rapidly transforming the entire sports industry and revolutionizing how athletes train, perform and heal. This event, co-hosted by the Harvard Innovation Lab, OneTeam Collective, and the Sports Innovation Lab, provides an overview of the quantified athlete and sports technology space, from fitness tracking and predictive performance analytics to real-time analytics and athlete career management.

How can businesses navigate this AI-driven future that we’re all moving towards? In this keynote from our 2018 Digital Transformation Summit, Amy Yu recommends companies focus on three things: data, talent and ethics.