Spring Break?

It’s spring break week and the Master of Science in Analytics (MSA) students will skip the annual migration to southern beaches, and instead dive into a three-day, intensive bootcamp to hone their communication skills. In today’s competitive marketplace employers seek the best analytical talent. But to be truly productive on the job, analytics professionals must also possess strong communication skills—to be able to effectively present the results of complex analytical work to senior management and non-technical clients. MSA students voted collectively to forgo their spring vacation in favor of investing the time and effort in bolstering their communication skills with the guidance of an industry trainer.

Trustees Approve Expansion

The NC State Board of Trustees has approved a proposal to expand the Institute that would double the size of its facility on Centennial Campus to 8,000 square feet. The new space will allow the Institute to consolidate its operations into a single location on the fifth floor of the Venture 2 Building. After the retrofit is complete, the facility will accommodate offices for faculty and staff, a 45-seat classroom, work areas for students, and a data center. The Institute is slated to occupy its new home in August 2008, and will allow the Master of Science degree program to double its current enrollment capacity of two-dozen students.

Sean Harris

Students Support Children’s Hospital

MSA students led by classmate Sean Harris contributed a record amount to the 24th Annual Pack-A-Thon, which raised a total of nearly $7,000 in support of the NC Children’s Hospital. Sean spent the day on February 9 with students from across campus helping to raise awareness about the importance of children’s health and the quality of life for children and family at the hospital. The MSA Class of 2008 joined together to support Sean’s effort with their contributions. Thanks to everyone for their generosity.

Guest Speaker Series Begins

The Institute’s spring semester speaker series kicks-off with special guests Roger Potter and Joseph Grillo, both of whom are analytics executives with Travelers Companies, Inc., in Hartford, Connecticut. Travelers is one of the largest providers of property and casualty insurance products in the United States with over 7.1 million personal insurance policies in force. Their talk centers on the application of advanced analytics in today’s insurance industry. The speaker series continues through April with invited guests from 17 companies.

Laura Ladrie

Ladrie Appointed Academic Program Coordinator

We are delighted to announce the appointment of Laura Ladrie as the Institute’s new Academic Program Coordinator. Laura oversees day-to-day operation of the Master of Science in Analytics degree program, working closely with our students and faculty. Laura served as a member of the university task force that led to the creation of the Institute. Since 2006, she worked in a half-time capacity to coordinate MSA curriculum development and implementation during the first year of the program. Prior to joining the Institute full-time, Laura worked as an IT consultant with the NC State University Information Technology Division.

Spring Semester Classes Underway

Angela and JillStudents in the Master of Science in Analytics began their spring semester with a packed schedule of classes in data and text mining, financial analytics, data visualization, and risk analytics. Students are continuing their work on the practicum projects, as well. The team projects will culminate in late April with each team delivering a presentation to the project sponsor. The spring schedule also includes a series of invited guest lectures.

Students Celebrate End of Fall semester

MSA students Dragos, Petr and TheresaStudents in the Master of Science in Analytics (MSA) celebrated the midpoint of their 10-month program of study with the successful completion of the fall semester today. Students gathered at a luncheon after their last exam before heading off for a one-month holiday recess. During the semester, students took courses taught by a team of faculty spanning several disciplines. Subjects covered included Time Series and Forecasting, Optimization, Data Security and Privacy, Text Analytics, Customer Analytics, Geospatial Data Analytics, Survival Analysis, and Data Mining.

Students Analyze Hybrid Electric Vehicles

Mahesh Pappu and Rajashekar Mareddy (MSA candidates, Class of 2008) are analyzing performance data on plug-in hybrid electric vehicles used by the City of Raleigh in conjunction with Centennial Campus-based Advanced Energy. The data are collected using on-board data loggers and off-board kilowatt hour meters during charging, and analyzed using JMP. The project is led by Advanced Energy’s Ewan Pritchard and Ken Dulaney.

Students Move to Venture 3

Venture IIIToday, the MSA program moved its operations from a temporary classroom in BTEC to the first floor in Venture 3. The new location includes a 24-seat classroom, work areas for student teams, an office for staff, and wireless networking and teleconferencing facilities. The lease extends to the end of the current academic year. The Institute’s head office remains in Venture 2. The process for locating space to occupy beyond June 2008 has begun. The new location will require classroom and workspace to accommodate significant growth in student enrollment over the next two years.

Institute Signs Lease in Venture 3

Venture IIIThe Institute for Advanced Analytics secured a short-term sublease on the first floor in Venture 3, which is adjacent to existing offices in the Venture 2 building on Centennial Campus. The present schedule is to occupy the new location by October 15. The lease will extend to the end of the current academic year pending approval by the NCSU Board of Trustees in September. Venture 3 will have a classroom, work areas for student teams, offices for staff, and wireless networking and teleconferencing facilities.

The Institute’s head office will remain in Venture 2.

Earp Speaks at Analytics Summit

Dr. Julie Earp participated on a panel discussion at the Business Analytics Concours Research Summit held September 25-27 at Babson College in Boston. The executive-level event featured Tom Davenport, author of Competing on Analytics: The New Science of Winning. Dr. Earp spoke about the Master of Science in Analytics. Dr. Earp specializes in data privacy and is the architect, along with Dr. Laurie Williams, of the Analytics Practicum.

Students Attend Data Mining Conference

David Dobson and Theresa Gilligan David Dobson (MSA ’08) will present his paper titled “Automobile Insurance Customers Profiling: A Business Application Case Study” at a poster session of the 10th Annual Data Mining Conference (M2007), in Las Vegas. Dobson will be joined by classmate Theresa Gilligan, who will share information about the MSA degree program with attendees in the exhibition hall. M2007 is one of the premiere venues for presenting data mining research and applications each year.

Fall Semester Classes Underway

Students in the Master of Science in Analytics program moved into the second phase of their studies with the commencement of fall semester classes today. The curriculum consists of newly developed “modular” courses designed for and limited to MSA students. Unlike conventional degree programs on campus, the MSA semester is partitioned into three segments each of which is five weeks in duration. The modules are taught by an interdisciplinary team of nine faculty from six departments in four colleges. The fall semester includes modules on topics such as Time Series and Forecasting, Optimization, Text Analytics, Customer Analytics, Data Security and Privacy, Geographical Data Analytics, Survival Analysis and Data Mining. With fall semester also begins the Analytics Practicum, in which students are organized into teams and engage with sponsoring organizations to work on real-world problems.

MSA Students Celebrate End of Summer

The intensive summer program, which ran full-time daily over a continuous 5-week stretch, was concluded successfully with a luncheon celebration at Lake Johnson Recreation Center in Raleigh. The summer program included 21 lecturers and 9 invited guest speakers covering a range of topics that focused on understanding the practical application of industry standard software tools to problems in advanced analytics. Many thanks to the joint NC State-SAS team that labored over the past year to plan and organize the summer session.

Teams Present Results of Summer Project

The summer curriculum culminated today with a series of team presentations made by two dozen MSA students. The students were presented with a challenging analytics project developed by Dr. Henry Schaffer, Dr. Jerry Oglesby and Laura Ladrie, using masked data on 100,000 records of consumer transactions. Teams were set to the task of data cleaning and analysis to uncover consumer patterns relevant to the business. Each of the six teams succeeded in highlighting significant facets in the the unique data sets they were given to analyze.

Max Jill Jennifer Petr
[ left to right: Max, Jill, Jennifer and Petr ]