Michael Housman

Chief Scientific Officer,
RapportBoost.ai

Human beings are poor decision makers. The field of behavioral economics has documented many cognitive biases – for example, over-confidence bias, loss aversion, outcome bias, hot hand fallacy – that influence our decision making and prevent us from behaving optimally. There are billions of sub-optimal decisions being made every day because we don’t have the right information at the right time in order to make the right decision.

In my work, I apply data science techniques to large datasets in order to extract insights that enable people to make more evidence-based, data-driven decisions. I believe that information alone can enable countless Pareto improvements that can improve millions of lives and allow organizations to engage their workforce more fully, operate more efficiently, deploy marketing resources more effectively, build stronger relationships with customers, and improve their bottom line.

After 15 years of applying empirical research and data science across a variety of different verticals, I’ve found that the combination of human + machine can be far more effective than either one by itself. I try to facilitate that through my work as a data scientist and an equity advisor in a number of different companies: hiQ Labs, Bakround, Performiture, Tenacity, Homebase, and RapportBoost.ai