The book describes advanced business analytics and shows how to apply them to many different professional areas of engineering and management. Each chapter of the book is contributed by a different author and covers a different area of business analytics. The book connects the analytic principles with business practice and provides an interface between the main disciplines of engineering/technology and the organizational, administrative and planning abilities of management. It also refers to other disciplines such as economy, finance, marketing, behavioral economics and risk analysis. This book is of special interest to engineers, economists and researchers who are developing new advances in engineering management but also to practitioners working on this subject.

Readers learn how daring companies have gone beyond the computerization of now mundane manufacturing and clerical tasks and introduced expert systems that automate human reasoning, judgment, expertise and knowledge in pursuit of greater efficiency and profit.

Nearly a decade ago, Johanna Drucker cofounded the University of Virginia’s SpecLab, a digital humanities laboratory dedicated to risky projects with serious aims. In SpecLab she explores the implications of these radical efforts to use critical practices and aesthetic principles against the authority of technology based on analytic models of knowledge. Inspired by the imaginative frontiers of graphic arts and experimental literature and the technical possibilities of computation and information management, the projects Drucker engages range from Subjective Meteorology to Artists’ Books Online to the as yet unrealized ’Patacritical Demon, an interactive tool for exposing the structures that underlie our interpretations of text. Illuminating the kind of future such experiments could enable, SpecLab functions as more than a set of case studies at the intersection of computers and humanistic inquiry. It also exemplifies Drucker’s contention that humanists must play a role in designing models of knowledge for the digital age—models that will determine how our culture will function in years to come.