Thanks to Professor Tilman Wolf for a Great Talk on An Economy Plane for the Internet

This week was the last week of the Fall 2014 Fall semester and yesterday we hosted two great events: a seminar by Professor Tilman Wolf, who flew back from a conference in Paris (he had left on Monday afternoon) to speak in our UMass Amherst INFORMS Speaker Series followed by, shortly thereafter, our end of the semester party!

Professor Wolf is an Associate Dean at the College of Engineering at UMass Amherst and is a Professor in its Department of Computer and Electrical Engineering. He has received many awards for his research on networking.

I first treated Professor Wolf, along with a group of doctoral students,  to lunch at the University Club, and we had such a great time talking and laughing that we were late for the reception prior to his talk, which began at 2PM.

Tilman is the PI on our big NSF Future Internet Architecture project: Network Innovation Through Choice,  that I am a Co-PI on and that two of my doctoral students, Sara Saberi and Dong "Michelle" Li, have received support from.

We were all very much looking forward to his talk, "An Economy Plane for the Internet." Frankly, since I have hosted probably about 100 speakers in the series that the students of the UMass Amherst INFORMS Student Chapter help me to organize,  I was a bit worried that he might not make it back in time from Europe so it was a big relief when I reached him yesterday morning.

His presentation attracted faculty, staff, as well as students from both the Isenberg School of Management and the College of Engineering as well as from the Office of Information Technologies at UMass. We had advertised the talk widely through our e-lists, the Isenberg School website as well as the UMass Amherst events webpage.

Michael Prokle, the President of the UMass Amherst INFORMS Student Chapter, assisting me with the Introduction

His talk  provided an outstanding motivation and overview of why ChoiceNet, which is the architecture that we are developing, will lead to greater innovation of the Internet in terms of network services. He presented multicasting and why multicasting has not been as successful as had been originally theorized that it would be. He described the principles of ChoiceNet, which I have blogged about. It was thrilling for the doctoral students who have worked with us to see their papers and names in his presentation!  He emphasized how ChoiceNet would offer more choices in terms of duration-based contracts and even, if desired by consumers, enhanced cybersecurity, which I am also very interested in.

His presentation generated many excellent questions, always the signature of a great talk!

 He has kindly provided us with his presentation, which has been posted here.

We thank Professor Wolf for taking time out of his exceptionally busy schedule for giving us such an outstanding seminar presentation!

Some of the audience members with Professor Wolf after his presentation

What We Learned from a Big Data Decathlete and Isenberg Alum

Today, the UMass Amherst INFORMS (Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences) Student Chapter had the pleasure of hosting Dr. Davit Khachatryan, of  PricewaterhouseCoopers (PWC) from Arlington, Virginia.

He received a PhD from UMass Amherst with a concentration in Management Science at the Isenberg School of Management just 2 years ago and has worked on some fascinating projects.

His presentation today at the Isenberg School, "Show Me the Data: My Experience as a Statistical Consultant," captivated the audience, which included undergrads, MBAs, and graduate students from both the College of Engineering and the Isenberg School.

Big data is a very hot topic these days not only because of the volumes that are being captured from RFID technology, ATMs, cell phones, social media, etc., but also the cost of storing data has really dropped from only a few years ago, so huge amounts of data are now available for analysis, if one can make sense of the data.


He talked about the cost of working with real data is that real data is dirty and that a large part of the time devoted to a project typically entails cleaning up and organizing the client's data so that one can then get to the interesting work of modeling and predictive analytics.

Clients now want reusable, robust, and automatic solutions, rather than a 1 time solution. He spoke a lot about using SAS and SQL and the importance of computer programming.

In addition, he spoke about testing models that clients use and the existence of  "model governance" boards in corporations that check the models.

The applications that he discussed (anonymized, for obvious reasons) included two in healthcare and one in finance -- catching whether rules that are in place work for "anti-money laundering" for a bank. Interesting, when he programmed the rules and ran the model over a long time horizon's worth of data the results differed from what the bank had caught in terms of such transactions. I loved the idea of forensics in this application domain.

Dr. Khachatryan emphasized the importance of managing relationships with clients, the importance of communication and writing skills, and also that a lot of work that needs to be done is not necessarily easy or fun.

His one hour presentation began at 2PM with a nice reception (and lunch) preceding it. I left at about 3:45 and the discussions were still going strong.

It was a terrific educational experience hearing about what it takes to be a data decathlete (knowing multiple regression, understanding time series, knowing about neural networks, being adept at computer programming, listening carefully to clients' needs,  building bridges with clients, and being a good team player).