Effective pricing and promotion planning constitutes a central pillar of strategic revenue management for firms operating in highly competitive and dynamic markets. These planning activities require the simultaneous consideration of demand elasticity, competitor actions, channel and market specific constraints, and financial objectives. As the dimensionality and interdependencies inherent in these problems increase, manual or traditional approaches become suboptimal and insufficient. In this context, Operations Research provides a robust methodological foundation for scalable, data-driven decision support systems that can optimize complex planning processes across large product and customer portfolios. This paper presents two large-scale optimization systems developed and deployed at PepsiCo to support Revenue Growth Management initiatives: PromoAI and PricingAI. PromoAI couples machine learning-based promotional forecasts with a mixed-integer linear programming model to optimize promotional calendars across trade channels, searching millions of product-promotion-timing combinations for the one that maximizes PepsiCo and retailer revenues subject to customizable business constraint
The microservice architecture for cloud-based systems is extended to not only require each loosely coupled component to be independently deployable, but also to provide independent routing for each component. This supports canary deployments, green/blue deployments and roll-back. Both ad hoc and system integration test traffic can be directed to components before they are released to production traffic. Front-end code is included in this architecture by using server-side rendering of JS bundles. Environments for integration testing are created with preproduction deploys side by side with production deploys using appropriate levels of isolation. After a successful integration test run, preproduction components are known to work with production precisely as it is. For isolation, test traffic uses staging databases that are copied daily from the production databases, omitting sensitive data. Safety and security concerns are dealt with in a targeted fashion, not monolithically. This architecture scales well with organization size; is more effective for integration testing; and is better aligned with agile business practices than traditional approaches.
Canary deployment routes a fraction of traffic to a new software version, monitors metrics, and rolls back on regression. Mainstream controllers (Argo Rollouts, Spinnaker, Flagger) change the deployed system's cryptographic identity during the canary window. The drift is harmless for stateless microservices but breaks the claim that "the agent you certified is still the agent you have" for safety-critical embodied agents, forcing re-certification per canary. We present ICAN-Deploy (Identity-stable CANary Deployment), a middleware construction whose state machine holds the identity hash invariant across the canary window by separating capability names (frozen, hashed) from capability versions (mutable runtime state). We implement ICAN-Deploy inside a runtime governance layer for LLM-driven robots and verify invariance by closed-form proof, AST lint, and TLA+ model-checking, then corroborate over N=100 real canary cycles on a Franka Panda arm in MuJoCo (zero drift; entry latency 95% BCa CI [1.52, 2.01] ms). A feature-flagged strawman that folds versions into the manifest falsifies on the same workload. A system certified once at identity-creation time can then ship arbitrary capabili
Popularized by the Bitcoin cryptocurrency, blockchain technology establishes a decentralized digital framework that utilizes cryptographic and consensus protocols to secure data against unauthorized modification. Consequently, blockchain has found broad adoption across diverse fields, including finance, data management, healthcare, and digital asset governance. In the quantum computing era, a paramount objective for blockchain is to preserve its foundational advantages of cryptographic integrity and decentralized fault-tolerant resilience. In principle, quantum digital signatures and quantum Byzantine agreement protocols offer foundational security guarantees and tolerate up to one-half of malicious nodes for blockchain. However, the practical realization of such a quantum-enhanced blockchain remains a significant and multifaceted challenge. Here, we propose and experimentally demonstrate a fully operational hybrid quantum blockchain architecture built on photonic integrated circuits and deployed over commercially available classical telecommunications infrastructure. The system achieves a fault tolerance of nearly one-half, surpassing the classical limit, while reaching consensus
Fairness audits of institutional risk models are critical for understanding how deployed machine learning pipelines allocate resources. Drawing on multi-year collaboration with Centennial College, where our prior ethnographic work introduced the ASP-HEI Cycle, we present a replica-based audit of a deployed Early Warning System (EWS), replicating its model using institutional training data and design specifications. We evaluate disparities by gender, age, and residency status across the full pipeline (training data, model predictions, and post-processing) using standard fairness metrics. Our audit reveals systematic misallocation: younger, male, and international students are disproportionately flagged for support, even when many ultimately succeed, while older and female students with comparable dropout risk are under-identified. Post-processing amplifies these disparities by collapsing heterogeneous probabilities into percentile-based risk tiers. This work provides a replicable methodology for auditing institutional ML systems and shows how disparities emerge and compound across stages, highlighting the importance of evaluating construct validity alongside statistical fairness. It
Deploying AI agents in enterprise environments requires balancing capability with data sovereignty and cost constraints. While small language models offer privacy-preserving alternatives to frontier models, their specialization is hindered by fragmented development pipelines that separate tool integration, data generation, and training. We introduce EnterpriseLab, a full-stack platform that unifies these stages into a closed-loop framework. EnterpriseLab provides (1) a modular environment exposing enterprise applications via Model Context Protocol, enabling seamless integration of proprietary and open-source tools; (2) automated trajectory synthesis that programmatically generates training data from environment schemas; and (3) integrated training pipelines with continuous evaluation. We validate the platform through EnterpriseArena, an instantiation with 15 applications and 140+ tools across IT, HR, sales, and engineering domains. Our results demonstrate that 8B-parameter models trained within EnterpriseLab match GPT-4o's performance on complex enterprise workflows while reducing inference costs by 8-10x, and remain robust across diverse enterprise benchmarks, including Enterprise
Reinforcement Learning (RL) has received increasing attention and adoption in real-world use cases. Most of these systems follow a train-then-fix paradigm, where trained agents do not learn while interacting with the world until performance degrades and retraining becomes necessary. In this position paper, we argue that deploying an agent that is incapable of optimality, but receives an evaluative reward signal, is inherently a continual RL problem. We identify four sources of non-stationarity after deployment that necessitate never-ending learning, and highlight why the best deployed agents never stop adapting. We analyze successful examples of continual RL in the real world, and present the community with the advantages and measures to move away from the current train-then-fix paradigm.
Addressing TedX, Amber Huffman made an impassioned case that "none of us is as smart as all of us" and that open-source hardware is the future. A major contribution to software quality, open source and otherwise, on the software side, is the systems design methodology of Continuous Integration and Delivery (CI/CD), which we propose to systematically bring to hardware designs and their specifications. To do so, we automatically generate specifications using specification mining, "a machine learning approach to discovering formal specifications" which dramatically impacted the ability of software engineers to achieve quality, verification, and security. Yet applying the same techniques to hardware is non-trivial. We present a technique for generalized, continuous integration (CI) of hardware specification designs that continually deploys (CD) a hardware specification. As a proof-of-concept, we demonstrate Myrtha, a cloud-based, specification generator based on established hardware and software quality tools.
Large language models (LLMs) integrated into agent-driven workflows hold immense promise for healthcare, yet a significant gap exists between their potential and practical implementation within clinical settings. To address this, we present a practitioner-oriented field manual for deploying generative agents that use electronic health record (EHR) data. This guide is informed by our experience deploying the "irAE-Agent", an automated system to detect immune-related adverse events from clinical notes at Mass General Brigham, and by structured interviews with 21 clinicians, engineers, and informatics leaders involved in the project. Our analysis reveals a critical misalignment in clinical AI development: less than 20% of our effort was dedicated to prompt engineering and model development, while over 80% was consumed by the sociotechnical work of implementation. We distill this effort into five "heavy lifts": data integration, model validation, ensuring economic value, managing system drift, and governance. By providing actionable solutions for each of these challenges, this field manual shifts the focus from algorithmic development to the essential infrastructure and implementation
Quadruped mobile manipulators offer strong potential for agile loco-manipulation but remain difficult to control and transfer reliably from simulation to reality. Reinforcement learning (RL) shows promise for whole-body control, yet most frameworks are proprietary and hard to reproduce on real hardware. We present an open pipeline for training, benchmarking, and deploying RL-based controllers on the Unitree B1 quadruped with a Z1 arm. The framework unifies sim-to-sim and sim-to-real transfer through ROS, re-implementing a policy trained in Isaac Gym, extending it to MuJoCo via a hardware abstraction layer, and deploying the same controller on physical hardware. Sim-to-sim experiments expose discrepancies between Isaac Gym and MuJoCo contact models that influence policy behavior, while real-world teleoperated object-picking trials show that coordinated whole-body control extends reach and improves manipulation over floating-base baselines. The pipeline provides a transparent, reproducible foundation for developing and analyzing RL-based loco-manipulation controllers and will be released open source to support future research.
A precise understanding of the optical properties of the instrumented Antarctic ice sheet is crucial to the performance of optical Cherenkov telescopes such as the IceCube Neutrino Observatory and its planned successor, IceCube-Gen2. One complication arising from the large envisioned footprint of IceCube-Gen2 is the larger impact of the so-called ice tilt. It describes the undulation of ice layers of constant optical properties within the detector. In this contribution, we will describe the project to build a co-deployed laser dust logger. This is a device to measure the stratigraphy of impurities in the ice to derive the ice tilt. It consists of a light source that will be co-deployed with the photosensor modules, meaning it is part of the deployment string and operated during the deployment of the detector. The newly developed device will be tested during the deployment of the IceCube Upgrade in the 2025/26 austral summer to pave the way for IceCube-Gen2.
Post-deployment monitoring of artificial intelligence (AI) systems in health care is essential to ensure their safety, quality, and sustained benefit-and to support governance decisions about which systems to update, modify, or decommission. Motivated by these needs, we developed a framework for monitoring deployed AI systems grounded in the mandate to take specific actions when they fail to behave as intended. This framework, which is now actively used at Stanford Health Care, is organized around three complementary principles: system integrity, performance, and impact. System integrity monitoring focuses on maximizing system uptime, detecting runtime errors, and identifying when changes to the surrounding IT ecosystem have unintended effects. Performance monitoring focuses on maintaining accurate system behavior in the face of changing health care practices (and thus input data) over time. Impact monitoring assesses whether a deployed system continues to have value in the form of benefit to clinicians and patients. Drawing on examples of deployed AI systems at our academic medical center, we provide practical guidance for creating monitoring plans based on these principles that s
With the growing concern of AI safety, there is a need to trust the computations done by machine learning (ML) models. Blockchain technology, known for recording data and running computations transparently and in a tamper-proof manner, can offer this trust. One significant challenge in deploying ML Classifiers on-chain is that while ML models are typically written in Python using an ML library such as Pytorch, smart contracts deployed on EVM-compatible blockchains are written in Solidity. We introduce Machine Learning to Smart Contract (ML2SC), a PyTorch to Solidity translator that can automatically translate multi-layer perceptron (MLP) models written in Pytorch to Solidity smart contract versions. ML2SC uses a fixed-point math library to approximate floating-point computation. After deploying the generated smart contract, we can train our models off-chain using PyTorch and then further transfer the acquired weights and biases to the smart contract using a function call. Finally, the model inference can also be done with a function call providing the input. We mathematically model the gas costs associated with deploying, updating model parameters, and running inference on these mo
Language models have gained significant interest due to their general-purpose capabilities, which appear to emerge as models are scaled to increasingly larger parameter sizes. However, these large models impose stringent requirements on computing systems, necessitating significant memory and processing requirements for inference. This makes performing inference on mobile and edge devices challenging, often requiring invocating remotely-hosted models via network calls. Remote inference, in turn, introduces issues like latency, unreliable network connectivity, and privacy concerns. To address these challenges, we explored the possibility of deviating from the trend of increasing model size. Instead, we hypothesize that much smaller models (~30-120M parameters) can outperform their larger counterparts for specific tasks by carefully curating the data used for pre-training and fine-tuning. We investigate this within the context of deploying edge-device models to support sensing applications. We trained several foundational models through a systematic study and found that small models can run locally on edge devices, achieving high token rates and accuracy. Based on these findings, we d
This paper presents the first AI/ML system for automating building damage assessment in uncrewed aerial systems (sUAS) imagery to be deployed operationally during federally declared disasters (Hurricanes Debby and Helene). In response to major disasters, sUAS teams are dispatched to collect imagery of the affected areas to assess damage; however, at recent disasters, teams collectively delivered between 47GB and 369GB of imagery per day, representing more imagery than can reasonably be transmitted or interpreted by subject matter experts in the disaster scene, thus delaying response efforts. To alleviate this data avalanche encountered in practice, computer vision and machine learning techniques are necessary. While prior work has been deployed to automatically assess damage in satellite imagery, there is no current state of practice for sUAS-based damage assessment systems, as all known work has been confined to academic settings. This work establishes the state of practice via the development and deployment of models for building damage assessment with sUAS imagery. The model development involved training on the largest known dataset of post-disaster sUAS aerial imagery, containi
Human-robot interaction requires to be studied in the wild. In the summers of 2022 and 2023, we deployed two trash barrel service robots through the wizard-of-oz protocol in public spaces to study human-robot interactions in urban settings. We deployed the robots at two different public plazas in downtown Manhattan and Brooklyn for a collective of 20 hours of field time. To date, relatively few long-term human-robot interaction studies have been conducted in shared public spaces. To support researchers aiming to fill this gap, we would like to share some of our insights and learned lessons that would benefit both researchers and practitioners on how to deploy robots in public spaces. We share best practices and lessons learned with the HRI research community to encourage more in-the-wild research of robots in public spaces and call for the community to share their lessons learned to a GitHub repository.
Deploying Deep Learning (DL) on embedded end devices is a scorching trend in pervasive computing. Since most Microcontrollers on embedded devices have limited computing power, it is necessary to add a DL accelerator. Embedded Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) are suitable for deploying DL accelerators for embedded devices, but developing an energy-efficient DL accelerator on an FPGA is not easy. Therefore, we propose the ElasticAI-Workflow that aims to help DL developers to create and deploy DL models as hardware accelerators on embedded FPGAs. This workflow consists of two key components: the ElasticAI-Creator and the Elastic Node. The former is a toolchain for automatically generating DL accelerators on FPGAs. The latter is a hardware platform for verifying the performance of the generated accelerators. With this combination, the performance of the accelerator can be sufficiently guaranteed. We will demonstrate the potential of our approach through a case study.
Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) applications are built from specialized components -- inference servers, object storage, vector and graph databases, and user interfaces -- interconnected via web-based APIs. While these components are often containerized and deployed in cloud environments, such capabilities are still emerging at High-Performance Computing (HPC) centers. In this paper, we share our experience deploying GenAI workloads within an established HPC center, discussing the integration of HPC and cloud computing environments. We describe our converged computing architecture that integrates HPC and Kubernetes platforms running containerized GenAI workloads, helping with reproducibility. A case study illustrates the deployment of the Llama Large Language Model (LLM) using a containerized inference server (vLLM) across both Kubernetes and HPC platforms using multiple container runtimes. Our experience highlights practical considerations and opportunities for the HPC container community, guiding future research and tool development.
Human-level autonomous driving is an ever-elusive goal, with planning and decision making -- the cognitive functions that determine driving behavior -- posing the greatest challenge. Despite a proliferation of promising approaches, progress is stifled by the difficulty of deploying experimental planners in naturalistic settings. In this work, we propose Lab2Car, an optimization-based wrapper that can take a trajectory sketch from an arbitrary motion planner and convert it to a safe, comfortable, dynamically feasible trajectory that the car can follow. This allows motion planners that do not provide such guarantees to be safely tested and optimized in real-world environments. We demonstrate the versatility of Lab2Car by using it to deploy a machine learning (ML) planner and a classical planner on self-driving cars in Las Vegas. The resulting systems handle challenging scenarios, such as cut-ins, overtaking, and yielding, in complex urban environments like casino pick-up/drop-off areas. Our work paves the way for quickly deploying and evaluating candidate motion planners in realistic settings, ensuring rapid iteration and accelerating progress towards human-level autonomy.