NM's Profile

What an interesting company! I think they have a great product since it is actually really easy to test the algorithms given the wide availability of historical data on investment yields. I wonder why quantopian does not also “crowd-sell” the product, selling its products to the wider public and increasing the potential revenue pools.

In general, I think that all those new start-ups could do a greater job working with more traditional institutions such as universities. It seems that many educational institutions, specially in the developing world, lag ~5 years in what they teach and could greatly benefit from interacting with companies such as Quantopian.

I love this idea and cellebrate that governments are moving to more decentralized democracies. However, recent experiences in this field are quite dissapointing, as usually public officers implement those tools out of “electoral” reasons and then forget them. Case in point, 2500 comments in a 6.3M inhabitant city does not seem to be a lot.

To improve this, I fully agree with you that the government should take the lead and proactively engage with the citizens by runing pilots and tests on the platform, provide real time feedback on what has been submitted and provide real incentives.

I wonder how far we are from manufacturing end products with additive manufacturing. Apparently, MedTronic is taking some “baby-steps” in this but is not heavily investing on additive manufacturing (only $2m does not seem much for such a company).

For MedTronic the upside of additive manufacturing is huge -from rapid prototyping to having more customized products for its customers. I really look forward to the day in which all of us have our own 3d printers at home and receive the blueprints from the designers.

I also wonder what are the regulatory implications of this new techonology, as it will “distribute” a lot of power and resources, dilluting the regulatory power of government agencies (i.e.: anybody could make their own devices at home).

Dear Anonymous,

tax breaks are very desirable in a country where 45% of the GDP is actually public spending (42% is taxes and 3%, budget and financial deficit). The problem is that, given those constraints, the timing is never great. Latin America in general has very pro-cyclical policy makers that over-spend in the good times and adjust the economy during the crisis (usually when commodity prices are low).

In other words, implementing tax breaks right now is not feasible and in three years now, when the crisis is over, there will be no incentives to do that because the more “traditional” industries will be providing for lots of resources.

Dear Reed,

Honoured to have one of my most admired businessmen commenting on my post.

From my experience dealing with the issue you mention (public-private collaboration), the main challenge is to deal with very ambiguous legal frameworks.

These legal frameworks are often used by the opposing political parties to prosecute officers (a kind of an attrition war). Therefore, officers do not engage with the private sector as much as they would like, because they do not want to go to jail.

Hey Andres! Chile usually provides with great examples of public policy making and management. Argentina also has a “top public management system” based on the French public administration model. Unfortunately it is not working well for many reasons.
I believe that we should appoint stable offices to overview many important policies, but as we like to say, “lo urgente mata a lo importante” (the urgent issues prevail over the important ones)

Great job and super interesting case-study! I really wonder why additive manufacturing is not more spread in the spare parts market. There are some parts with very low turnover that are hard to get in some more distant locations, but that could be locally produced at a low cost. Spare parts distributors or retailers could own the machines to further reduce costs.

Great article and very interesting topic as well. A few years ago I worked with a legal firm that had automated systems to track files both in the justice and in government agencies. Through machine learning and advanced analytics it could take automated action and provide real time insight to lawyers to improve the efficiency of their procedures. This firm had a huge competitive advantage in some high-volume/low-cost procedures such as dealing with early retirement programs.

Regarding Mo’s point, I completely see what you say. However, I think that this use of machine learning is super low-risk and a great complement to highly-qualified attorney work. If developments like this are incremental and safe, sooner than later our environment will be really different.

Hey Chrissy! great article and very interesting topic, too. I have some experience at this and I have seen the power of implementing big data and machine learning to improve policy making.

However, I think that the problem that many (if not most) governments face is that of having internal mechanisms to engange in those kind of efforts. For instance, in many countries, a public officer purchasing a product for which there is only one supplier might (and will) be prosecuted.

I really wonder how technology can help in those cases. Blockchain has a great potential to add trustworthiness to the system, replacing bureaucratic controls by smarter and more modern techonologies, but there many “big if’s” witch which officers could not deal yet.