Our Mission
Smart Picker is a start-up which was started in the beginning of 2011 with the two goals of helping people making decisions and improving their decision making process.
Our Vision
Our time spent in the academic and research sector as well as our experience in the private sector convinced us of one thing: Those methods can be applied in an infinite number of fields. They can help companies, organizations, as well as individuals to improve their decision making process and, consequently, their decisions.
The Team
In the founding team, we all come from the Free University of Brussels (Engineering Department). After our studies, we lived our first professional experiences in different domains which make us now completely complementary.The Academician
After looking at his CV, you would expect an old geeky teacher but he is actually a very nice and accessible young person (maybe a little geeky) with an impressive list of publications in world leading journals and presentations at conferences all over the globe. During his PhD, he travelled a lot in different world leading departments in the Decision Aid field which permitted him to acquire all the desirable theoretical skills to cope with any possible decision problem. Besides research and teaching at different universities, he is also working as a consultant.
The IT-Specialist
As an experienced project manager, he lead during several years different teams of IT analysts, software architects, programmers, and testers for the development of quality programs . He then became responsible of the governance of the IT department in an multinational company. His role being to ensure compliance with rules and procedures aligned with the strategy of the executive committee, and to guarantee the quality and effectiveness of all the IT services.
The Strategy Planner
He spent most of his young career in one of the biggest manufacturing companies in the world, specifically in the small team responsible for all the important decisions regarding the production. He learned over there the importance of a good decision making process. If you add to this experience his tendencies to enjoy programming at nights, and his love for strategic games like chess or poker, he becomes the natural partner to develop projects around decision making software and consulting.
Renown Collaboration
Several persons and organisations believed in our project from the start. Amongst them, let us cite our partners who collaborate closely with us:- Professor Alessio Ishizaka from the University of Portsmouth, Founding member of the "DECISION DECK Foundation" and leading researcher in Decision making, Data Mining, Expert Systems, Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA). Alessio helped us in the development and testing of the software.
- Professors Laure Morel and Mauricio Camargo from the ENSGSI (École nationale supérieure en génie des systèmes industriels, University of Lorraine ). They were one of the first to believe in Smart Picker’s Decision Aid solutions. They helped us for the testing of the software, and use it on a daily basis to analyse the capacity to innovate of the companies in the Nancy area.