The Institute is delighted to announce that Dr. Agus Sudjianto, senior vice president and head of Quantitative Risk at Bank of America will deliver our fifth Executive Guest Lecture of 2009 on November 30. Dr. Sudjianto’s talk is titled “Quantitative Risk Management at Bank of America.”

Bank of America is one of the world’s largest financial institutions, serving individual consumers, small and middle market businesses, as well as large corporations with a full range of banking, investing, asset management and capital market. Data-driven business analytics and quantitative models are ubiquitous in all these business activities. The ability to handle very large data sets and transform them into insightful and forward-looking information is crucial to provide the best service to customers/clients as well as to maximize shareholder values. Read the rest of this entry »

We are delighted to announce that Tim Gabel, vice president for Survey and Computing Sciences at RTI International will deliver our fourth Executive Guest Lecture of 2009 on November 13. Mr. Gabel’s talk, titled ”The Data-driven Decision Maker,” will examine the challenge facing business today in solving complex problems with a vast amount of data. The Institute gratefully acknowledges the generous support of SAS as sponsor of the guest lecture series.

As VP of Survey and Computing, Mr. Gabel has responsibility for RTI’s largest research unit with $160M in revenue and 435 permanent staff across four separate divisions: Survey Research Division, Research Computing Division, Education Studies Division, and Division for Research Services. He has work for RTI for the past decade and previously served as director of the Research Computing Division. Read the rest of this entry »

Dr. Michael Rappa will moderate a panel discussion on Analytics at the 2nd Annual Internet Summit to be held on November 4-5 at the Raleigh Convention Center. The Summit is a showcase for forward thinking and thought leadership on topics related to the Internet economy and Web-oriented technologies such as social media, real-time, cloud, online advertising, search, blogs, mobile, e-commerce, usability, video, design and other best practices. Read the rest of this entry »

The Institute welcomes once again noted entrepreneur Atul Jain for a special guest lecture. Mr. Jain’s talk, entitled “The Road to Success,” will focus on his experience over two decades starting-up companies on both coasts. The talk will be held on Friday, October 23 from 2:00-5:00 PM in Engineering Building I, Room 1005 on NC State University’s Centennial Campus (space is limited; please RSVP at 513-1613).

Mr. Jain founded TEOCO (The Employee Owned Company) in 1994 with a dream of building a successful business model, not just a successful business. His goal was to build a company that did not compromise its values.  TEOCO’s corporate culture is its biggest asset.  Mr. Jain has created numerous mechanisms for employee-owners of TEOCO to participate in the decision-making process, encouraging and coaching them to act as owners along the way. Read the rest of this entry »

The Analytics Practicum is a core component of the MSA curriculum that gives students an opportunity to work in teams on challenging projects with real-world data sponsored by industry. The Institute is pleased to announce our project sponsors for 2009-10 include:

• Blue Cross Blue Shield of North Carolina — is a leader in delivering innovative health care products, services and information to more than 3.7 million members.
• CA — is a $4 billion provider of enterprise IT management based in Islandia, New York.
• Constellation Energy — is a $20 billion supplier of energy products and services to electric and natural gas customers and headquartered in Baltimore.
• Deluxe Corporation — based in Minnesota, Deluxe is a $1.5 billion financial products and services company that serves 4 million small businesses and financial institutions.
• Hallmark Cards — a privately held greetings card company based in Kansas City, Missouri, with revenues of $4.4 billion and 16,000 employees worldwide.
• IBM Corporation — the global leader in computer systems and services with $98.8 billion in revenue and 386,000 employees worldwide.
• Lulu Enterprises — an entrepreneurial Raleigh-based company that enables authors to publish works and connect with readers.
• Railinc — is the largest source of real-time railroad data, headquartered in Cary, NC, and a wholly owned, for-profit subsidiary of the Association of American Railroads.

The practicum runs throughout the fall and spring semesters and serves as an integrative experience for the entire MSA curriculum. The practicum includes specialized instructional elements to develop teamwork, project management, data cleaning and handling, communication, and presentation skills. The practicum culminates each year in April with a written report and presentations to the sponsors.

The Organizing Committee of the Nineteenth International World Wide Web Conference (WWW2010) welcomes the participation of researchers from around the world to submit original and pioneering research related to the Web for presentation and discussion next April in Raleigh, North Carolina. Read the rest of this entry »

The Institute’s Industry Advisory Board (IAB) held its second meeting of 2009 today on Centennial Campus at the Park Alumni Center. The meeting included a series of presentations and feedback discussions focused on the MSA curriculum. The IAB includes nearly 40 companies from across the country representing a broad cross-section of industries. The Board’s input plays an instrumental role in keeping the MSA curriculum relevant and on the cutting edge.

We are delighted to announce that Randy Jones, vice president for Strategy, Architecture at GlaxoSmithKline – North America Pharmaceuticals IT, will deliver the third executive guest lecture of 2009. The topic will be: Pharmaceutical Marketing Data–How the Pharmaceutical Industry Searches for and Takes Advantage of Information. The Institute gratefully acknowledges the generous support of SAS as sponsor of the guest lecture series.

With GlaxoSmithKline for about 25 years, since 1984, Randy is responsible for consulting on strategy and architectural design within the GSK IT groups across North America.  He also is responsible for the GSK North America Information Warehouse.  He most recently managed the production deployment of the  Teradata information warehouse platform at GSK.  Taking advantage of this new platform, GSK is currently undergoing an information transformation, building a broadly integrated data environment including internally generated data integrated with vendor collected and industry syndicated data sets.

Among three competitors from the MSA Class of 2009 that submitted entries in this year’s M2009 Data Mining Shootout, one has been named a finalist in the competition. Congratulations are in order for Suchismita Nandi. Additionally, Dr. Simon Hsiang, who teaches Data Mining and Survival Analysis to MSA students, participated as faculty adviser. There were a totally of 47 teams that registered to participate in the Shootout from 13 universities.

The winner of the competition will be announced at M2009 Data Mining Conference in Las Vegas on October 27.

The MSA Class of 2010 enrolled in late June and proceeded at a breakneck pace through a six-week boot camp covering basic statistics and statistical programming. In addition to completing 5 credit hours of the MSA curriculum, 75% of the class also succeeded in passing the optional SAS Base programming certification. It is expected that over 90% will complete the certification before year-end, and half will complete the certification for advanced programming. Congratulations to the 39 members of the Class of 2010 who succeeded in completing the summer portion of the MSA program.