MIT team’s school-bus algorithm could save $5M and 1M bus miles

Re:MIT team’s school-bus algorithm could save $5M and 1M bus... by chrisallenlane on Friday August 11, 2017 @12:20PM (#14991385)

> citizen impact per employee.

Do you think it would actually possible to quantify this in a way that:

1. Accurately represented "reality"?

2. Couldn't/wouldn't be gamed?

Seems challenging to me.

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Re:MIT team’s school-bus algorithm could save $5M and 1M bus... by dclowd9901 on Friday August 11, 2017 @04:20PM (#14993786)

I think you can probably boil impact down to several key metrics:

1) How many people are affected by the work of this agency

2) How quickly are peoples' needs handled on average

3) How pleased are people with the work of this agency

I think you could trivially measure each of those.

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Re:MIT team’s school-bus algorithm could save $5M and 1M bus... by jacalata on Saturday August 12, 2017 @02:31AM (#14996728)

How pleased people are this year, or in ten years time? There are lots of ways to make users happy in the short term at the expense of long term benefits.

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Re:MIT team’s school-bus algorithm could save $5M and 1M bus... by jooke on Saturday August 12, 2017 @07:30AM (#14997488)

If the police stopped arresting people then criminals would be much more pleased with their work

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Re:MIT team’s school-bus algorithm could save $5M and 1M bus... by zentiggr on Friday August 11, 2017 @02:25PM (#14992785)

I've never seen any metric that can't be gamed somehow.

Choosing metrics to represent practical value, rather than let them be decided by profit-seekers, that's the real trick.

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