ITS Newsletter – Winter 2017

Information Technology and Systems Program Continues to Grow

Contributed by Dr. Dawn Owens, director of the BS in Information Technology and Systems program and all ITS programs in the Information Systems Area

The ITS program has seen steady growth in enrollment, student engagement and overall student satisfaction. A 60 percent increase in the number of fall 2016 applicants was observed over last year at the same time. Our fall 2017 enrollment numbers continue to trend in that direction. We currently have more than 550 students enrolled in the program, a 25 percent increase from fall 2015. In addition to expanding outreach activities through events such as the ITS Academy summer camp, we have actively engaged students through student organizations like the Association for Information Systems (AIS) and Women in Technology and Business (WITB).

The AIS-UTD chapter organized a career-expo workshop hosted by State Farm Insurance Companies. A Google Analytics Workshop, facilitated by JSOM Web Services, helped students understand the nuances and impact of social media. In partnership with the campus Office of Student Volunteerism, students participated in a Tech Tutors session at Highland Springs, a retirement community near UT Dallas.

WITB is maturing into an organization that aims to break down the stereotypes surrounding technology and business, and acquaint more women with the benefits of information technology and its impact on their career progression. Recently, WITB hosted a pizza social, a career-expo preparation with the Jindal School’s Career Management Center and a negotiation workshop with executives from KPMG and Pariveda Solutions. The workshop provided tips for negotiating salary, paid time off and non-monetary benefits when accepting a job offer.

Overall, the program is leveraging its industry partners to provide students with a well-rounded experience. We continue to see a job-placement rate above 90 percent upon graduation, and our students have many opportunities and events to engage with industry.

2016 IS PhD in Management Science Graduates

Dr. Anwesha Bhattacharjee joined UT Dallas in August 2010. As a PhD student, she worked under Dr. Vijay Mookerjee in developing advertising optimization models for Facebook. Bhattacharjee joined The Mercury, the student newspaper, in 2010, where she started as a contributing reporter. She went on to serve as the features editor and web editor for four years, winning several state and national awards in collegiate journalism. She also co-produced an award-winning podcast and a TV series for Student Media. She also has blogged for The Dallas Morning News. She now works full time as a senior data scientist at Sabre in Southlake, Texas.

Dr. Zhen Sun also joined UT Dallas in 2010. Her primary research interests include information systems and digital marketing, designs of online platforms and economic impact of information technology. Her work has been published in MIS Quarterly and at several top information systems conferences. She won the Best Dissertation Proposal Award at the 25th Annual Workshop on Information Technologies and Systems.

“As a PhD student at UT Dallas, I was provided all kinds of resources to help me start an academic career,” Sun said. “I had opportunities to work closely with outstanding faculty who are passionate about doing research, and I really appreciate that they invested their time in me.”

She is now an assistant professor at The George Washington University in Washington, D.C.

Two Business Analytics Teams Advance to Adobe Semifinals

Adobe’s annual competition for university students, Adobe Analytics Challenge, kicked off Sept. 22. This academic year Adobe partnered with Sony PlayStation to analyze its business data using Adobe tools. Growing every year, the competition in 2016 provided almost $50,000 in prizes with about 250 teams participating, including several Top 20 business schools. For the two-month competition, teams used business analytics tools to interpret and develop insights from real-world data.

Two UT Dallas teams made it to the national semifinals. Team Anumana, comprised of Mounika Akumalla and Yashwant Vadlamani, both MS in business analytics majors, and Dhanalakshmi Vellaichamy, a dual MS in business analytics and MBA major, was mentored by business analytics program director Kashif Saeed.

The second UT Dallas team in the semifinals was Analytics Elites. Team members were MS students Monika Soni, business analytics; Sahiba Miglani, management science; and Janelle Manuel, dual MBA and business analytics.

Business Analytics Student Places Third in Data-Mining Competition

MS in business analytics student Udayachandar Kadiyala placed third, earning $1,000, in the first national data-mining competition organized by Rang Technologies and KVRA Tech. The two-month contest, which ran last April and May, attracted 278 teams from 86 universities. Kadiyala, who graduated last summer, competed as a one-person team. He finished just behind the first-place team from Columbia University and the second-place team from North Carolina State University.

ITS Summer Academy

The inaugural ITS Summer Academy was held at the Jindal School last June. Spearheaded by Dr. Dawn Owens, director of the BS in Information Technology and Systems program, the STEM-focused camp introduced 30 high school students to various aspects of information technology.

During the five-day program conducted by UT Dallas faculty, the students learned how to build computers, develop databases, implement cybersecurity and develop basic programming skills. State Farm Insurance helped to sponsor the academy, which included field trips to corporate sites.

“We received tremendous positive feedback from the parents of the high school students who attended,” Owens said.

Information Technology and Management or Business Analytics?

Contributed by Kashif Saeed, director of the MS in Business Analytics program, The Difference Between ITM and Business Analytics was first published Nov. 4, 2016, on the JSOM Perspectives blog. It was one of the most highly read posts of the past year.

What is the difference between ITM and business analytics, and which one should I choose? I have lost count of how many times I’ve been asked this question since I joined UT Dallas in fall 2014. Almost two and a half years have passed, but the frequency of getting the same question continues to grow. I will try to use this post to share my two cents about this topic. See blog post.

Information Systems Prof Leads Local Health Informatics Platform Team

Dr. Indranil Bardhan, professor of information systems and the Information Systems Area coordinator at the Naveen Jindal School of Management, is serving as senior investigator on a National Science Foundation-funded project to design and construct a patient-focused and personalized health system that addresses the fractured structure of healthcare information.

The project, “Large-Scale Medical Informatics for Patient Care Coordination and Engagement,” received a $1 million grant from the National Science Foundation’s Big Data Initiative. A three-year effort that began last September, the project involves close cooperation with the South Region Big Data Hub at Georgia Tech.

By using information about the environment gathered through real-time, mobile and wearable devices and social media data, the team will create a detailed and comprehensive picture of a patient’s health and a tool to help manage patients’ engagement with their healthcare providers.

Successful completion of the project will accelerate progress in addressing challenges related to health disparities, healthcare access and precision medicine, Bardhan said. Progress will come by “improving care coordination, longitudinal health-record creation and cohort tracking, and by creating a system to enable closed-loop feedback once the patient is discharged,” he said. “Simply put, the integration of patients’ sensor-based data with clinical data from electronic health records will enable improvements in diagnosis, monitoring and care coordination between patients and providers.”

The team also includes researchers from Emory University, Georgia Tech, Morehouse School of Medicine, University of Arkansas, Little Rock; UT Southwestern Medical School; University of Virginia; and West Virginia University.

Information Systems Professor Earns Young Researcher Award

IS Assistant Professor Mehmet Ayvaci received the Best Young Researcher Award last October from the Workshop on Health Information Technology and Economics for the paper “Classification in the Presence of Anchoring Bias: A Model and an Application to Breast Cancer Diagnosis.” Co-authors are IS faculty member Dr. Srinivasan Raghunathan and Dr. M. Eren Ahsen from IBM Research. The abstract can be found here.

Information Systems Professor’s Early Career Award Follows Successful Workshop

Associate IS Professor Jianqing Chen in November received the 2016 Sandra A. Slaughter Early Career Award from the Information Systems Society of the Institute for Operations Research and Management Sciences (INFORMS). The award recognizes and honors early career individuals who have earned a PhD within the past 10 years and who are on a path toward making outstanding intellectual contributions to the information systems discipline.

The award came after Chen co-chaired the 10th China Summer Workshop on Information Management (CSWIM 2016) held in Dalian, China, last June. The workshop provided researchers and practitioners in information management and related areas an opportunity to present original ideas and share insightful opinions. The theme of CSWIM 2016 was Internet Plus, Business Innovation and Analytics.

The workshop attracted more than 250 participants, a record number, including scholars from the U.S., Canada, China, Finland, Hong Kong, Singapore and South Korea.

Keynote speakers included Dr. Arun Rai, editor-in-chief of MIS Quarterly, and Dr. Vijay Mookerjee, Charles and Nancy Davidson Chair in Information Systems at the Jindal School.

Information Systems Faculty Members Bring Home Awards

Drs. Indranil Bardhan and Zhiqiang (Eric) Zheng were named runners-up for the Best Paper of the Year Award at the INFORMS Annual Meetings in Nashville, Tennessee, last November. The INFORMS Information Systems Society and Information Systems Research journal recognized their paper “Predictive Analysis for Readmissions of Patients With Congestive Heart Failure.” The work, co-authored with Jeong-ha (Cath) Oh of Georgia State University and Kirk Kirksey of UT Southwestern Medical Center, appeared in the March 2015 issue of Information Systems Research and was featured in a May 2015 UT Dallas News Center story.

Dr. Amit Mehra and co-author Anuj Kumar of the University of Florida were runners-up for the Best Paper Award at the 2016 Workshop on Information Systems and Economics in Dublin in December for their paper “Remedying Education With Personalized Learning: Evidence From Randomized Field Experiment in India.”

In addition, Mehra served as chair of the information systems track for the Production and Operations Management Society conference in Orlando in May 2016. He was recognized by INFORMS this year for service as an associate editor for the Information Systems Research journal and was appointed co-chair of the 2017 Conference on Information Systems and Technology.

Information Systems Professors Developing Project Management Curricula

Information Systems Professor William (Bill) Hefley has helped develop project management curricula for several years, contributing to the Project Management Institute’s curriculum and the PMI Teach repository of project management teaching materials. Several of his cases are among the top 10 downloaded resources on PMI Teach.

Hefley was invited to two 2016 Project Management Curriculum Resources Workshops for Phase 2 Development of this work. These workshops focused on creating a new course design in project-management leadership and communication meant to teach new hires both technical and soft skills.

Hefley also was a participant in a panel on Integrating Ethics and Professionalism Learning Outcomes in a Project Management Course at the 22nd Americas Conference on Information Systems last August in San Diego.

Hefley and Dr. Mark Thouin, director of the MS in Information and Technology Management program, have been collaborating for several semesters to bring project-management simulations into their agile project-management classes. JSOM partnered with simulation developer Fissure to gain access to the pre-release Agile Project Management simulation. Lessons learned, from both faculty and student perspectives, were shared with Fissure and a wider audience through a paper and poster presentation at the 22nd Americas Conference.

Hefley recently was appointed to a two-year term on the board of directors of the Society for Disability Studies, a scholarly group that promotes disability studies as an academic discipline.

Information Systems PhD Candidate Earns Conference Paper Accolade

IS PhD candidate Manmohan Aseri recently was named runner-up for Best Conference Paper at the 21st INFORMS Conference on Information Systems and Technology in Nashville, Tennessee, for “Procurement Policies for Mobile-Promotion Platforms.” Co-authors are JSOM Operations Management professors Dr. Milind Dawande, Ashbel Smith Professor and Operations Management Area coordinator; Dr. Ganesh Janakiraman; and Dr. Vijay Mookerjee, Charles and Nancy Davidson Chair in Information Systems. The abstract of the paper can be found here.

New Information Systems Faculty for Fall 2016

Russell Torres, a clinical assistant professor, is responsible for educating undergraduate and graduate students on topics related to the management and analysis of business data. Torres conducts research on maximizing the value of business intelligence and analytics investments. His research has appeared in Business Process Management Journal, the Journal of Computer Information Systems and several books.

Prior to his work in academia, Torres served as a senior manager with Accenture, where he spent 14 years helping design, develop and deliver custom applications as a member of the technology company’s architecture, development and integration practice. In this capacity, he provided expertise for companies in the telecommunications, financial services and aerospace industries, as well as assisting both state and federal government clients.

Torres holds a PhD in business computer information systems from the University of North Texas, as well as a master’s degree in management information systems and a bachelor’s degree in bioenvironmental science from Texas A&M University.

Kashif Saeed received his master’s degree in computer information systems at the University of Houston. He worked in several positions as business intelligence and data architect before joining the Jindal School as an adjunct faculty member in fall 2014. In 2015, he received the Outstanding Teaching by an Adjunct Faculty Member Award. He designed High Performance Analytics, a graduate course that covers Qlikview and SAP Hana. In July 2016, he was appointed director of the MS in Business Analytics program. He enjoys interacting with students. He has conducted a number of seminars to assist students at various stages of their UT Dallas experience.

New ITS and Business Analytics Program Manager

Beth Kent joined the Information Systems Area as the program manager for the BS in Information Technology and Systems and the MS in Business Analytics program in August 2016. Kent handles marketing and recruiting activities, event planning, data collection and internship course administration for both majors. She communicates with prospective students on the application process and advises new and current students on program requirements, internships, job-search strategies and professional development. She is active in leading the newly formed Business Analytics Student Leadership Council. She also supports initiatives of the Association for Information Systems and Women in Technology and Business student organizations. She earned her undergraduate business administration degree in management from Michigan State University.

Information Systems Fall Industry Advisory Board Meeting

The Nov. 1 meeting of the Information Systems Industry Advisory Board began with Kevin Christ, senior director of Alvarez & Marsal, a management consulting firm, moderating a lively panel discussion titled “Ludicrous Speed: Developing IT Strategy in the Face of Accelerating Business and IT Paradigm Shifts.” Panelists talked about tactical and strategic approaches to managing the increasing velocity of business change as it relates to the demands placed on IT departments.

Panelists included Joan Holman, chief information officer at the law firm Strasburger & Price; H. William Gordon, senior principal at Neutrino Peach Labs; and Brian Bonner, former CIO at Texas Instruments. The panelists provided great insight from their respective experiences and discussed how advances in information technology help businesses innovate.

Following the panel session, faculty member Dr. Kelly Slaughter provided an update on the Center for Information Technology and Management, recognizing several organizations that have donated time, money and projects to UT Dallas. These donations allow students to enrich their learning and gain a competitive advantage by having hands-on experience with industry projects and activities. Drs. Mark Thouin and Dawn Owens, directors of the graduate and undergraduate programs, provided updates about their respective programs. The next meeting will be held this spring.

IT and Business Users Break New Ground at BI + Analytics Conference

JSOM Clinical Assistant Professor of Information Systems Judd Bradbury and Geoff Scott, the president of ASUG, delivered the keynote address at the Americas’ SAP Users’ Group BI + Analytics Conference last October in New Orleans. Bradbury, a SAP University Alliances professor, shared some of his research findings as well as his views on how analytics technologies like machine learning and visual data narratives will play a role in disrupting industries.

As part of the conference, professors from the SAP University Alliances program conducted a session on how university students learn analytics in the classroom.

“Universities are disrupting how they teach analytics to ensure that graduates understand analytics from both a technical and business perspective — and can provide value to employers on day one,” said Colleen Raftery, manager of University Alliances and Next-Gen Labs at SAP.

“I had the privilege of moderating the session, which explored how four universities from our SAP University Alliances program have brought leading analytics technologies to the classroom, and how the analytics skills and knowledge acquired create early talents upon graduation,” Bradbury said. “The workshop was highly attended by professionals from industry with a robust amount of questions from the session attendees.”

Tableau Demonstration Session Attracts More Than 100 Students

Contributed by Harini Rajagopal, Treasurer, MIS Club

With Tableau being the buzzword for data visualization in the business analysis world, the MIS Club recently invited three software consultants from Tableau Austin to present a hands-on training session in the Jindal School to demonstrate how people around the globe use Tableau for data scraping, visualizations and decision-making.

This session, attended by more than 120 undergraduate and master’s students, presented an in-depth analysis. In the two-hour session, the product consultants presented material from their international conference held in Austin. They covered best practices in creating a dashboard, using the “ask Tableau” feature and using a live Airbnb dataset to create multilevel timeline charts with Tableau’s built-in prediction engine.