ITS Newsletter – Summer 2018

Undergraduate Internships on the Rise

As the Bachelor of Science in Information Technology and Systems program continues to grow, so does the number of students in internships during the semester. ITS students are working as interns all over the Dallas-Fort Worth area and overseas. There are currently 80 students pursuing academic credit for the summer semester — a 23 percent increase over last summer.

Here is a sampling of our summer 2018 internships:

ITS Academy Welcomes Younger Students to Campus

The ITS Academy was created in part to provide outreach opportunities and garner interest in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) programs among younger students. To date, the academy has held three events this year — HackIT, the G.I.R.L.S. STEM Symposium and the summer ITS Exploration Camp. To learn more, visit the ITS Academy webpage.

HackIT, Feb. 9-10

• 52 student participants
• 16 student/faculty volunteers
• 8 industry professionals

HackIT was a two-day challenge to build an interconnected device to protect the home. Teams were given Arduino circuit boards with an assortment of sensors and add-ons to create an innovative product. Students learned not only how to code and program the Arduino software but also how to think outside the box.

G.I.R.L.S. STEM Symposium, March 23-24

• 55 student participants
• 10 student/faculty volunteers
• 10 industry professionals
• $10K donation

The G.I.R.L.S. STEM Symposium was a two-day event to educate young women in the abundance of STEM career paths open to them. Activities included roundtable discussions with female IT industry professionals, a panel with ITS students and workshops built around programming, supply chain, circuitry and analytics.

Competitions Help Students Hone Their Skills

CoMIS Case Study Competition, April 11-13

CoMIS gives future IT leaders the opportunity to test their business acumen, problem-solving, teamwork and presentations skills against their peers in a case competition designed to simulate real-world business conditions. This year, a team of ITS students, Alma Semock, Taha Zar and Rubeena Habibi, advanced to the CoMIS national competition at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis. The national event included a 24-hour case competition, and educational and networking events with corporate sponsors such as 3M, General Mills and Cargill. Before the team left for the competition, Dr. Kelly Slaughter, the team’s coach, set up practice presentations for the participants with executives from across the DFW area. Check the CoMIS Facebook page for 2019 competition information.

2018 Pitt Business Analytics Competition in partnership with Dick’s Sporting Goods March 22-23

In this analytics case competition, students were required to use data analytics to solve pressing issues in the retail space and to provide recommendations to a panel of industry judges. Students went through a Preliminary Case Rules competition, which required a three-page report. The report was compared with those from teams across the country, and the UT Dallas team successfully advanced to the next round in Pittsburgh. The team included Chandrika Bodduru, Alma Semock, Sravya Vemulapati and Jaffer Razvi.

For the next round, the team received the topic and data required for the case details 10 days before the competition and had to prepare a 25-minute presentation. Their assignment was to determine how Dick’s Sporting Goods should sort basketballs on a shelf to move product and enhance that business unit. The team had to demonstrate its approach to analytics, and make and defend specific recommendations for the 2018 Holiday Basketball Assortment. Although they did not place in the competition, the students said that it was an unforgettable and invaluable experience from which they gained skills they can use in the future.

Quick and Easy Coffee Chats Help Students

Throughout the 2017-18 academic year, Dr. Dawn Owens, BS in ITS program director, and Beth Kent, program manager, partnered with the ITS Leadership Council to hold regular Coffee Chats with current and prospective ITS students. Students could stop by, grab coffee and doughnuts, and chat.

Upcoming Coffee Chats are posted on the Comet Calendar and around the JSOM building as well as emailed to ITS students. They usually are held once a month outside the Davidson Auditorium.

Future-Gazing the Focus of AIS Conference

The Information Systems Area hosted the 2018 Association for Information Systems “Technologies of Tomorrow” Student Chapter Leadership Conference in April. The three-day conference offered networking opportunities, case competitions, industry and student panels, workshops, industry keynotes and site visits to such companies as State Farm, Toyota and Essilor. Information systems students and faculty from all over the country and one international group from Poland attended, for a total of 245 participants.

An opening social at Southfork Ranch helped students from different schools and backgrounds network.

The next day, the UT Dallas AIS chapter set up many student leadership sessions and workshops to help prepare students for their future endeavors as IT professionals. One session, “NEMO (Never Miss an Opportunity), Medicine for Guaranteed Success,” was headed by Gaurav Shekhar, MS in ITM program manager and a 2016 MS in ITM alumnus. Other leadership sessions focused on using analytics for decision-making, project management, presentation skills and running effective organizations.

The rest of the day was dedicated to four competitions focused on blockchain, software innovation and analytics.

The final day was dedicated to eight workshop sessions organized and prepared by the UT Dallas AIS chapter and Jindal School ITS faculty. Some of these workshops included IT industry trends, blockchain 101, Tableau and data analytics in the insurance industry. A story on the conference can be found on Inside Jindal School.

Graduate Student Starts Campus WITI Chapter

Women in Technology International (WITI) was founded to help women advance by providing access to and support from other professional women working in technology. WITI started in 1989 as the International Network of Women in Technology. In 2001, the network evolved into the WITI Professional Association, the world’s leading trade association for tech-savvy women. Today, WITI is a global organization that empowers women in business and technology to pursue top goals and personal transformation in business and technology.

Inspired by the goals and mission of WITI, student Dhanushuya Thangavel expanded the organization by creating an academic chapter at UT Dallas. Thangavel worked for Tata Consultancy Services in India for three years before working on her master’s degree at UT Dallas.

Women in Technology International at UT Dallas is a nonprofit professional student organization that aims to create a conducive and confident environment for women to establish their stand and to surmount challenges in various fields of technology. The group’s goal is to engage more women in careers in technology through various on-campus events such as networking, leadership experience, technology workshops, mentoring and career fairs. There is no cost to join, and membership is open to any interested JSOM student. For more information, email Dhanushuya Thangavel, president, at dxt161030@utdallas.edu or Dawn Owens, faculty advisor, at dawn.owens@utdallas.edu.

2018 IS PhD Spring Graduates

Dr. Manmohan Aseri entered the Jindal School PhD program in Management Science in August 2012. This July 1, he joined the Tepper School of Business at Carnegie Mellon University as a visiting assistant professor.

“I really had a great time at UT Dallas and was fortunate to be part of a very productive research group,” Aseri said. “The academic environment at UT Dallas is one of the best I have seen, and the University is highly respected in the academic circle. The IS PhD program at UT Dallas is very well-structured and funded.”

Aseri’s doctoral thesis on “Procurement Policies for Mobile-Promotion Platforms” was published online last fall.

Dr. Yeongin Kim joined the program in August 2013. He worked under Dr. Srinivasan Raghunathan and Dr. Mehmet Ayvaci in studying the economic impact of information technologies in healthcare. His doctoral thesis, “Essays on the Economics of Information Sharing in Healthcare,” is under review in top information systems journals.

“The IS PhD program at UT Dallas provided me great opportunities to work closely with outstanding professors,” Kim said. “I am grateful for all the intellectual support and valuable advice that our professors have provided to me during my stay at UT Dallas.”

Kim will start as an assistant professor of information systems at Virginia Commonwealth University in August.

Dr. Cheng Nie will join Iowa State University as an assistant professor in August. He entered the PhD program in August 2012.

“It’s been a long journey. Most of the time, I was working on my dissertation with my excellent advisors: Sumit Sarkar and Eric Zheng,” Nie said. “Their dedication to great research has always inspired me to work hard and be creative. Both of them have shown, by example, how to be a productive researcher. I expect our mentorship and friendship to continue for years to come.

“In my spare time, I ran. In 2017, I ran at least 5K every single day. Even when I went for campus visits for my job interviews, I kept on running. I finished my first full marathon in Allen, Texas, on Dec. 31, 2017, in 3 hours, 17 minutes. My personal best is 3 hours, 3 minutes at the 2018 Irving Marathon. Running is like meditation in motion. It gives me equanimity and fitness to face the challenges in my life.”

Dr. Danish H. Saifee will join the Department of Information Systems, Statistics and Management Science at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa this fall as an assistant professor (tenure-track).

Saifee’s research interests include healthcare information systems, healthcare analytics, social media in healthcare, socioeconomic and behavioral analysis of online user-generated content, business analytics, information systems security, numeric and textual data mining, and econometric modeling.

While at the Jindal School, he co-authored a paper, “Do Online Reviews of Physicians Reflect Healthcare Outcomes” with Drs. Indranil Bardhan and Zhiqiang (Eric) Zheng that earned the best paper award at the 2017 International Conference for Smart Health. A subsequent version of this paper, “Are Online Reviews of Physicians Reliable Indicators of Clinical Outcomes? A Focus on Chronic Disease Management,” with Drs. Zheng, Bardhan and Atanu Lahiri earned the best student paper award at the Eighth Conference on Health IT and Analytics in 2017.

Saifee also was featured in an April 2017 UT Dallas News Center story that focused on “Healthcare Outcomes, Information Technology, and Medicare Reimbursements: A Hospital-Level Analyses,” a study published in the International Journal of Electronic Healthcare. Co-authored with Bardhan, the paper developed the foundation for one of the chapters of Saifee’s doctoral dissertation.

IAS Challenge 3.0

The Intelligence Analytics Society, a student organization at the Jindal School, held its third annual flagship competition, Intelligence Analytics Challenge 3.0, last spring. BS/BBA, MS and MBA majors from UT Dallas, UT Arlington, Texas A&M University-Commerce and as far away as Deakin University in Australia participated. Sixty-two teams competed in the first round.

Free to use any analytical and visualization tool, students were asked to come up with meaningful insights about an American housing dataset that was provided to the competitors. The top 10 teams were then invited to a full-day datathon held April 7 at UT Dallas.

Datathon teams were provided a housing survey dataset and asked to find meaningful business insights within six hours. Students presented their findings in front of a judges’ panel of professors from UT Dallas and professionals from Armeta Analytics. Prize money totaling $2,050 was awarded to the top three teams, all from UT Dallas. The winners are listed and pictured below.

MS in ITM Internship Stories

A major feature and benefit of the MS in Information Technology and Management program at UT Dallas is its internship program. This past spring, 222 MS in ITM students had the opportunity to work on a paid internship and apply some of their classroom learning to projects at corporate firms. Student feedback from these internships was highly positive.

Often, the internship experience is transformational in a student’s educational journey leading to new growth opportunities and offers of full-time employment. As part of the internship program, students are required to post a summary of their experience on LinkedIn. The summaries provide valuable insight into our students’ career efforts and highlight many of their accomplishments. See #UTDMSITM for a detailed look.

Thanks to the work of interns from the MS in ITM program, companies including Essilor of America, ERP Logic and EZLynx came to campus to hire more interns from the program for the upcoming semesters. All three companies have shown strong interest in candidates from the program because of the variety of skills and experience they offer. All the present interns have been offered full-time positions in these companies.

MS in ITM Spring 2018 Graduation Awards

In all, 445 students graduated from the MS in ITM program this spring, one of the biggest classes in the history of the school. On April 16, more than 120 students and faculty attended a graduation celebration that included Dean Hasan Pirkul and Vice Dean Varghese Jacob. The MS in ITM Graduation Awards, which were instituted in fall 2017, were presented. The winners were:

• Padmaja Gharge – Distinguished Mentor
• Vishal Keswani – Distinguished Practitioner
• Prateek Jalan – Distinguished Innovator
• Neha Gokhale – ITM Impact
• Mehul Gangwal – ITM All Rounder

Project Management Club Establishes Scholarship Fund

The Project Management Club (PMC) held its first Alumni Mixer on April 14, bringing together current student members and alumni — both previous PMC members and alumni of the project management programs in the Executive Education Area. A highlight of the evening was the announcement of the newly established PMC Alumni Scholarship Fund. Its first donations arrived as part of Comets Giving Day on April 3. The fund provides PMC alumni or those interested in the development of future project managers at JSOM the opportunity to support aspiring students. Questions about the fund can be directed to Corey Troxell at Corey.Troxell@utdallas.edu or 972-883-5128.

OWLIE Awards for IS Recipients

At the Jindal School, OWLIE is an acronym for Outstanding Worthy Leaders Involved Exceptionally, and OWLIE awards are presented annually. The spring award event provides a platform to recognize students, faculty, staff, mentors and alumni special service to and on behalf of the Naveen Jindal School of Management.

MS in ITM graduate student Vishal Keswani won the Jindal Selfless Heart honor. His award recognized a graduate student in JSOM who has won hearts through selfless acts of service to others and/or the community. As president of the UT Dallas Indian Students Association, Keswani has led with compassion for students, a collaborative approach with other campus groups and strong academic abilities.

Gaurav Shekhar, MS in ITM program manager and an MS in ITM 2016 graduate, received the OWLIE for Outstanding Staff Member for his service, counseling and support that helps students become successful. Shekhar also is active in Toastmasters International and is an advisor to the JSOM Toastmasters club Orators at UTD. He organized the Q&A with the Toastmasters International second vice president and JSOM alumnus Richard E. Peck.

See OWLIEs for awards presented to other JSOM students, faculty, staff, mentors and alumni.

Information Systems Research Editor’s Cut

Congratulations to the authors of the following papers for being selected by Information Systems Research for its Editor’s Cut listing:

Editor’s Cut is an aggregate of industry-focused innovations and applications in advanced research on a wealth of topics. They are selected by journal editors and make it easier than ever before to identify and utilize a variety of great information about operations research and analytics across a range of current topics and issues.

Mandatory Standards and Organizational Information Security
Chul Ho Lee, Xianjun Geng and Srinivasan Raghunathan
Information Systems Research, Vol. 27, Issue 1, March 2016: 70-86.

Research Note—Patching the Cloud: The Impact of SaaS on Patching Strategy and the Timing of Software Release
Vidyanand Choudary and Zhe (James) Zhang
Information Systems Research, Vol. 26, Issue 4, December 2015: 845-858.

Optimal Policies for Security Patch Management
Debabrata Dey, Atanu Lahiri and Guoying Zhang
INFORMS Journal on Computing, Vol. 27, Issue 3, Summer 2015: 464-477.

Intrusion-Detection Policies for IT Security Breaches
Hulisi Ogut, Huseyin Cavusoglu and Srinivasan Raghunathan
INFORMS Journal on Computing, Vol. 20, Issue 1, Winter 2008:112-123.

University Faculty Governance

Three IS faculty members will serve in the UT Dallas Academic Senate in the coming school year. They are Dr. Judd Bradbury, clinical assistant professor; Dr. William (Bill) Hefley, clinical professor; and Dr. Syam Menon, professor of information systems and area coordinator. Menon was elected to serve as a member of the Academic Council, a smaller body formed from the Academic Senate that meets regularly with President Richard C. Benson and Provost Inga Musselman. Hefley will continue for the third year as a member of the Academic Council and was elected to serve as the secretary of the faculty.

New CITM Director

Dr. Ranavir (Ron) Bose will become director of the Center for Information Technology and Management (CITM) this fall upon the departure of the current director, Dr. Kelly Slaughter, who will join Texas Christian University in Fort Worth. Bose joined the JSOM Information Systems Area last fall after transferring from the Erik Jonsson School of Engineering and Computer Science at UT Dallas.

New Business Analytics Support Coordinator

Mary Christine Sayre joined the MS in Business Analytics team in December 2017 as senior academic support coordinator. As a graduate of SMU, where she studied liberal arts, she worked in academic administration for most of her career. She has served as an academic advisor, registrar and associate dean of student affairs in Dallas colleges and universities. Mary Chris hopes to bring her blend of experience in academics and student affairs to support and enhance students’ overall experience in the graduate business analytics program and the UT Dallas community.