Fair Isaac® Blaze Advisor® business rules management system has won two recent honors from Yphise and The Association for Co-Operative Operations Research and Development (ACORD).

The Blaze Advisor system has been certified as the best on the market by Yphise, an independent ISO 9001:2000-certified research company that helps IT executives make informed strategic, operational and investment decisions.

Yphise based its in-depth comparative analysis on more than 150 technical and functional assessments for each of the leading products included in the study. The firm's researchers aggregated these assessments into four categories that enable enterprises to evaluate Business Rule-based Decision Management products, including each system's ability to provide effective decision execution and comprehensive decision management, guarantee consistency of results, and integrate into heterogeneous operational systems. In Yphise's assessment, the Blaze Advisor system stood out on all four dimensions.

"In our evaluation, the Fair Isaac system proved to offer businesses greater agility to adapt to changes," says Marie-Pierre Lecrenay, senior analyst of Yphise. "We noted that it allows users to write, manage, change and store rules themselves, without bringing in an IT specialist. That translates to better control over decisions."

Fair Isaac has also received the Innovative Implementation Award from The Association for Co-Operative Operations Research and Development (ACORD), the worldwide insurance industry standards body. The award was announced at the 2008 ACORD-LOMA Insurance Systems Forum in Las Vegas.

The award recognizes Fair Isaac for its business value and innovative application of ACORD standards. Fair Isaac Blaze Advisor® business rules management system provides a critical platform for small compensation, organized risk evaluation quoting and underwriting systems for property and casualty commercial lines. The system features a standard, ACORD XML-based object model, a combination of business rules-based decisioning and rules-deployed analytics, and a powerful user interface offering effective real-time quoting and underwriting capabilities leveraging SmartForms for Blaze Advisor.

"Today more than ever, businesses require decision management tools that give them a competitive edge amid fierce economic conditions," says Carole-Ann Matignon, vice president of Product Management, Fair Isaac. "This recognition from ACORD underscores the value that Fair Isaac Blaze Advisor delivers in this challenging environment."

Fair Isaac has more than doubled new business growth in Asia-Pacific for the first half of financial year 2008. This growth is largely attributable to a significant increase in the number of international and domestic banks investing in Fair Isaac tools and technologies.

Notable new clients include Citibank (Korea), GenWorth Financial (Australia and New Zealand), High Mark Credit Information Services (India), National Healthcare Group (Singapore), Singapore Civil Defense Force as well as China's Bank of Communications.

Fair Isaac has also accelerated its commitment and investments in the region, establishing a presence in Seoul and another in Shanghai, its second representation in China after Beijing. Fair Isaac has also doubled its headcount across Asia-Pacific as it continues to hire aggressively in the region.

"These are important milestones for Fair Isaac and underscore our continued commitment to expanding our presence in Asia Pacific," said J.Y. Pook, vice president and managing director, Asia-Pacific market, Fair Isaac. "In response to the global credit crisis, many of our Asia Pacific clients are leveraging Fair Isaac's leading-edge decision management tools to increase customer loyalty, automate decisions while effectively managing risk, and gear up to meet global regulatory and compliance standards. "

Fair Isaac and the University of California, San Diego announced the winners of the fifth annual UCSD data mining contest last week.  The contest offers students a chance to test their data mining skills on real world data. 

In this year’s contest, participants were asked to classify data from a science experiment using primarily unlabeled training data. Nearly 200 teams from 18 countries participated, with the winners taking home a total of $8,000 in prize money. 

Fair Isaac and UCSD awarded prizes in four categories. First prize honors went to:

• Standard Classification, Graduate/Post-Doctoral: Christoper D. Wassman, UC Irvine, USA
  
• Standard Classification, Undergraduate: Lovro Subelj, Universty of Ljubljana, Slovenia
  
• Semi-Supervised Classification, Graduate/Post-Doctoral: Ka Chung Sia, UCLA, USA
  
• Semi-Supervised Classification, Undergraduate. Lovro Subelj, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia

More information and the full list of winning teams can be found at mill.ucsd.edu.

 “Through this academic contest, we’re offering students the opportunity to look at data in new and interesting ways in a real-world scenario,” said Professor Charles Elkan, Computer Science and Engineering at UC San Diego. “We’re proud to be associated with the analytics industry leader in recognizing our students’ scholastic achievements through this innovative data mining competition.”

“We’re delighted to engage these talented students by sponsoring the data mining contest,” said Dr. Andrew Jennings, vice president of Research at Fair Isaac. “This contest gives students an opportunity to discover what their peers at Fair Isaac have long known — that business is an inexhaustible source of analytic challenges.” 

Fair Isaac has sponsored the data mining contest since 2004, and also supports student internships throughout the year.

In the new book Extreme Risk Analysis of Dynamic Interdependent Systems, Chenyang Lian, analytic scientist in Fair Isaac’s Research group, sheds new light on the risk of extreme events—such as 9/11, Hurricane Katrina or the subprime mortgage crisis—on interdependent systems.

In the past few years, the US has seen a number of such events, in which the whole US economy is impacted due to the interdependencies among various economic sectors, even though some sectors may not be affected directly. The goal of Chenyang’s research was to study the interdependencies among economic sectors to understand how they interact with each other during the recovery period following an extreme event, so that we can better manage the risks of economic and other losses. It should be valuable to professionals in risk analysis, homeland security, and portfolio risk management.

Chenyang has served as an analytic scientist at Fair Isaac for two years and has worked on various economic research, portfolio stress testing and Basel II methodology projects. This research was conducted while Chenyang completed his doctoral degree at the University of Virginia Center for Risk Management of Engineering Systems. 

The book is now available from Amazon and Barnes & Noble.

Fair Isaac will co-sponsor the Lafferty Cards Central and Eastern Europe 2008 Conference and Exhibition at the Hilton WestEnd in Budapest on October 1- 2. Daniel Melo, a principal consultant in Fair Isaac Solutions Management for Europe Middle East Africa, will speak about the challenges of payment collections in emerging economies as part of a panel looking at profit-based vs. risk-based decisions.

At the conference, attendees can exchange views and experiences on the cards and payments landscape in Central and Eastern Europe. The region is one of the most vibrant cards markets worldwide, moving rapidly from emerging status only a few years ago towards a market with myriad players and opportunities.

More information and registration details are available here.