Dr. Radhika Kulkarni, VP of Advanced Analytics R&D at SAS, to speak at the Isenberg School

We are delighted to announce - so be sure to mark your calendars - that Dr. Radhika Kulkarni, VP of Advanced Analytics R&D at SAS, will be speaking at the Isenberg School of Management on Friday, March 6, 2015, just over a month away!

This visit has been in the planning for a while and we are delighted that we will have an opprtunity to welcome Dr. Kulkarni to UMass Amherst.

Dr. Kulkarni's presentation title is: Succeeding with Business Analytics: Key Challenges.

The officers of the UMass Amherst INFORMS Student Chapter prepared the nice poster below announcing her presentation, which I expect will attract a standing room only audience.

I have known Radhika for a while through WORMS (Women in Operations Research and the Management Sciences) and she is the supervisor of one of my former doctoral students, Dr. Padma Ramanujam, whose doctoral dissertation received the best dissertation award from what is now the Transportation Science & Logistics Society of INFORMS. I was a very proud academic mother when the announcement was made.

I have visited both Padma and Radhika at SAS's beautiful campus  in Cary, NC.

That morning we will have a meet and greet with Dr. Kulkarni, followed by a reception, and her presentation and lunch with a roundtable afterwards with grad students.

The student chapter and I are very grateful to the INFORMS Speakers Program which is sponsoring her visit, in part, along with my Operations & Information Management Department, with additional support from my Chaired Professorship Smith Funds.

Radhika is the recipient of the WORMS Award in 2006 (and when I received the same award the year after, she presented me with the ward). She was elected an INFORMS Fellow in 2014 at our San Francisco meeting. This time around I preceded Radhika since I became an INFORMS Fellow in 2013.

Thrilling New Big Data R&D Initiative from NSF-NIH

Yesterday was an exciting day for big data with the U.S. federal government announcing a major new research initiative on big data at a level of funding of $200 million.

Even The New York Times yesterday featured an article on the joint program between the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) and the National Institutes of Health (NIH). According to the article: Big data refers to the rising flood of digital data from many sources, including the Web, biological and industrial sensors, video, e-mail and social network communications. The emerging opportunity arises from combining these diverse data sources with improving computing tools to pinpoint profit-making opportunities, make scientific discoveries and predict crime waves, for example.

There was a great quote in the article by Dr. Farman Jahanian of the National Science Foundation’s Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) directorate: "Data, in my view, is a transformative new currency for science, engineering, education, commerce and government." “Foundational research in data management and data analytics promise breakthrough discoveries and innovations across all disciplines.”

Just a few minutes before logging off for the night, to settle down and read The Times, I received the following email from Dr. Jahanian announcing the great news:

Dear Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) Community,

This afternoon at a White House event, the Administration unveiled a Big Data Research and Development Initiative, which creates enormous opportunities for extracting knowledge and insights from large and complex collections of digital data. The CISE community is well poised to become an active participant in this new initiative.

NSF Director, Dr. Subra Suresh, joined other federal science agency leaders to discuss cross-agency plans and announce new research efforts to address big data. NSF will direct its current efforts to develop new methods to derive knowledge from data; construct new infrastructure to manage, curate and serve data to communities; and forge new approaches for associated education and training.

The cornerstone of the announcements includes a joint NSF-NIH solicitation on foundational research for big data. The "Core Techniques and Technologies for Advancing Big Data Science & Engineering," or "Big Data" (http://www.nsf.gov/funding/pgm_summ.jsp?pims_id=504767>) program aims to advance the core scientific and technological means of managing, analyzing, visualizing and extracting information from large, diverse, distributed, and heterogeneous data sets in order to accelerate progress in science and engineering research. Specifically, it will fund research to develop and evaluate new algorithms, technologies, and tools for improved data management, data analytics, and e-science collaboration environments.

Other announcements included anticipated cross-disciplinary efforts such as an Ideas Lab to explore ways to use big data to enhance teaching and learning effectiveness, and the use of NSF’s Integrative Graduate Education and Research Traineeship, or IGERT, mechanism to educate and train researchers in data enabled science and engineering.

For more information, please see the NSF press release (http://www.nsf.gov/news/news_summ.jsp?cntn_id=123607&org=NSF&from=news)...). We look forward to your participation.

Best,

Farnam

Farnam Jahanian
Assistant Director for CISE
National Science Foundation

Data and Analytics Are the New Currency

The science of analytics, coupled with massive amounts of data, is transforming the world that we live in.

Cyber-physical systems, which we have been calling Supernetworks for a decade now, are impacting transportation, the electric grid, health care, complex supply chains, and provide promise for smart cities.

The EE Times has a marvelous article which notes that: According to the U.S. President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, such “cyber-physical systems” will eventually constitute 50 percent of all electronics worldwide, making them a U.S. strategic asset.

In response, the National Institute of Standards and Technology recently announced a standardization effort to define interfaces for interoperability, as well as metrics and methods for measuring and comparing performance among smart systems. Such efforts set the stage for U.S. entrepreneurs to build successful smart systems from homegrown designs, but to realize those designs with electronics that are manufactured at low cost overseas.

Mr. Mario Morales of International Data Corp. (IDC) has a great quote in the article: "Data is the new currency" and he proceeds to say that "Enterprises have yet to figure out how to monetize all this data, but there is a tremendous opportunity here."

I would say that Data and Analytics Are the New Currency, since without analytics not much sense can be made of the massive data streams now available.

Our latest National Science Foundation project, "Network Innovation Through Choice," will, we expect, drive innovation in network choices and options through novel payment systems that monetarize performance based on reputation and success.

New Female CEO of IBM as the Glass Ceiling Shatters

I am VERY impressed by the announcement that IBM has selected as its new CEO, to start in 2012, a female, and one with a degree in computer science from Northwestern, no less!

This is fantastic news.

According to The New York Times: Virginia M. Rometty, a senior vice president at I.B.M., will be the company’s next chief executive, the directors announced on Tuesday. She will succeed Samuel J. Palmisano, who will remain as chairman, at the start of next year.

The selection of Ms. Rometty for the top job at I.B.M. will make her one of the highest-profile women executives in corporate America, joining a small group of women chief executives that includes Ursula Burns of Xerox, Indra Nooyi of PepsiCo, Ellen J. Kullman of DuPont and Meg Whitman of Hewlett-Packard.

And, what is also very exciting, given the focus now on analytics by many of our professional societies, including INFORMS, is that Ms. Rometty has pushed to expand the company’s fast-growing analytics unit, which uses clever software to sift through the vast amounts of data inside companies, on the Web and social networks, to help clients look for sales and cost-saving opportunities.

Great news on all counts!

Analytics for Trucking Featuring Warren Powell in Forbes

Before I even had a chance to glance at our most recent issue of Forbes, my husband called out to me saying that there was an interesting article in it on Calculus for Truckers. As soon as he noted the title, I responded that I bet that the article was featuring research by Professor Warren Powell of Princeton University, and I was right!

The feature article arrived with perfect timing for my Transportation & Logistics course that I will start teaching next week and it is a great read.

As Warren (I will use his first name since he has been a fellow colleague through INFORMS and various Society of Transportation & Logistics activities for a long time) notes in the article, the research of his that Schneider National has been using, dates back to the 1980s. He has also worked with yellow Freight and other major logistics providers.

According to the Forbes article:

What interested Schneider, a full-truckload carrier, was Powell's work in the field of approximate dynamic programming, which is a way to make decisions in the presence of uncertainty. Schneider needed a model that could take into account the nonobvious and sometimes random variables that affect the efficiency of thousands of drivers over weeks of time and at a high level of detail.

It is fantastic that more and more industries are realizing the importance of analytics, coupled with algorithms and simulation, to enable the exploration of policy changes on the entire system.

"The thing that's so powerful is that when someone presses us on the impact of different policy changes, we have the facts, we have the data. We can produce reports and analysis so that if someone else brought in their scientists, they would have to agree," said Ted Gifford of Schneider. "The value is to be able to take these complex business opportunities and give them a good, solid analysis."

It is certainly a fantastic time to be working in analytics and operations research!

Thanks also to Forbes for such great coverage of research that is making such a difference in practice!

Hopefully, the success of such research will enable additional applications of analytics / operations research to various industries at a quickened pace.

SAS and Evidence-based Decision-Making and Analytics in the New York Times

Today's NY Times has a feature article on the software powerhouse, SAS, which is based in Cary, North Carolina. The article traces its history and founding by Mr. Goodnight and three colleagues from North Carolina State University in 1976 and highlights how, even today, SAS allocates 22% of the company's substantial revenue to research and development. The article has links to SAS's gorgeous campus, which includes a pool, a daycare and preschool for employees' children, on-site medical care, and more! Of the 100 largest companies in the world, 92 use SAS software.

However, SAS is now being threatened by such major corporations as IBM, which is investing billions of dollars in what is being called business intelligence software, for predictive modeling and analytics, which enhances evidence-based decision-making. With the tremendous increase in data availability through the Internet and sensors, companies are now increasingly understanding the huge untapped potential of operations research tools and statistical models and methods.

The environment at SAS has fostered creativity but the competition is growing and SAS will be having to readjust to significant outside competitive pressures. The article discusses how SAS's leadership is planning on handling these new challenges.

One of my former doctoral students, Dr. Padma Ramanujam, whose dissertation that I chaired, entitled, Transportation Network Policy Modeling for Congestion and Pollution Control: A Variational Inequality Approach, which received the 1999 dissertation prize of the (then-called) Transportation Science Section of INFORMS, is an employee of SAS. Dr. Ramanujam is also a Center Associate of the Virtual Center for Supernetworks that I am the Founding Director of. Dr. Ramanujam, after receiving her PhD with a concentration in Management Science from the Isenberg School at UMass Amherst, joined I2 Technologies in Richardson, Texas, and then moved on to SAS.

SAS has had a very supportive environment for females and I would like to single out the work of Dr. Radhika Kulkarni of SAS, who received the 2006 WORMS (Women in Operations Research and the Management Sciences) Award of INFORMS. A year later, she chaired the same award committee when I was the recipient of the 2007 WORMS Award. We had a chance to reflect on the careers of females in technical industries and to also reflect on the nurturance of female doctorates. Some photos from the award ceremonies and festivities can be found here.

In conversations with Dr. Kulkarni of SAS, so many wonderful memories came flooding back, including those surrounding the writing of the Environmental Networks book with two of my female PhD students, Padma Ramanujam and Kanwalroop "Kathy" Dhanda. How many technical books are there out there authored by three (or more females) I wonder?!

Looking at the photo of the pool on the New York Times website that accompanied the article on SAS, I was reminded of the corporate positions that I held after receiving my two undergrad degrees from Brown University (and while pursuing my Master's degree from Brown). The positions were in high tech, defense consulting and I was based on Aquidneck Island (Newport and Middletown) in Rhode Island. The intensity of the software research and development work was balanced by runs and marathon training with views of the Atlantic Ocean.

Congrats to companies that realize that simply sitting at a computer is not where the best ideas come from!