The Institute for Business and Information Technology (IBIT) is pleased to announce the release of The IBIT Report –Information Systems Job Index, by Munir Mandviwalla, Crystal Harold, and Maria Boggi, Temple University.
IBIT News
Jeff Hamilton, SVP, Business Technology, Pfizer, appointed Executive In Residence
Temple University’s Institute for Business and Information Technology (IBIT) has appointed Pfizer executive Jeff Hamilton as its newest Executive in Residence.
Pfizer’s Senior Vice President of Business Technology, Hamilton visited Temple’s Fox School of Business Wednesday, Dec. 6. He engaged with faculty and students on topics and projects of mutual interest, including the activities of IBIT, the Fox School, and its nationally ranked Management Information Systems (MIS) department.
Said Laurel Miller, Director of Temple IBIT: “Jeff is an excellent mentor who is committed to student development. He is always looking to engage with faculty on research, as well. In other words, he was a natural choice to serve as an Executive in Residence for IBIT.”
The IBIT Executive in Residence program facilitates interaction between industry leaders and the faculty and students of Temple University’s Fox School of Business.
Hamilton, in his role with Pfizer, leads business technology in the global innovative pharmaceutical business, including contributions in the achievement of its strategic priorities through the use of digital, data, and analytics capabilities. He also is responsible for directing Pfizer’s global enterprise resource planning program, including the deployment of single-enterprise solution to integrate company’s manufacturing, commercial, and finance operations.
Prior to joining Pfizer, Hamilton served as an associate partner with Andersen Consulting, where he led large operational transformation programs for pharmaceutical and other Fortune 500 companies.
Hamilton holds a Master of Business Administration degree in information systems from the University of Buffalo, where he also attained a Bachelor of Science degree in engineering.
Industry and Academic Experts Highlight the Practical Path Forward for Artificial Intelligence
Since Isaac Asimov created the three laws of robotics in 1942, artificial intelligence has been a distant unattainable vision for business. On November 15, Temple University’s Institute for Business and Information Technology (IBIT) gathered academic and industry leaders to create a pragmatic path for generating value from Artificial Intelligence (AI) and related technologies such as machine learning.
The IBIT symposium on “The Practical Path Forward: Cognitive Computing, Artificial Intelligence, and Analytics” organized in cooperation with Emtec Inc., an advisory firm, attracted about 100 local and national experts.
Keynote speaker Jeff Hamilton, Senior Vice President, Pfizer, demonstrated how AI is in action today at Pfizer and other firms in improving healthcare such as physician interaction, patient adherence, and access. Jeff Szuba, Vice President of Analytics at NBCU and voted by attendees as one of the symposium’s highest-rated speakers, showed how analytics is driving consumer engagement using scalable data foundations in the media industry.
Another highly rated speaker, Ron Kim, a private equity expert at TPG Global, and former CIO of Exelon, showed how to separate hype from practical reality. David Schuff, Professor and Chair of MIS at Temple University presented research directions relating to the role of unsupervised algorithms in shaping business. Sunil Misra, President, Emtec, presented a well-received use case on robotic process automation (RPA).
Speakers from DARPA, Alexion, QVC, LiquidHub, AmerisourceBergen, Comcast, Aetna and MuHu covered topics such as cognitive networking, infrastructure, consumer personalization and real time insights, and AI self-service platforms.
“The speakers provided tangible, practical, and measurable examples of the role of AI,” said Dr. Munir Mandviwalla, IBIT executive director, “It was an excellent day of knowledge sharing, which is — after all — the essence of a university.”
Contact:
Christopher A. Vito
Associate Director of Communications
cvito@temple.edu, 215-204-4115
View more information about the symposium here.
View photos from the event here.
Winners Announced For 5th Annual Temple University QVC Analytics Challenge
Does speed matter in e-commerce? How can you eliminate the harmful effects of smoking on society? How can you predict which movies will be a hit or a bust? These were the questions posed this year by the annual Temple University QVC Analytics Challenge and its sponsors QVC, Pfizer, and NBCUniversal.
Now in its fifth year, 582 students from 10 different schools and colleges across the university participated in the competition, organized by the Institute for Business and Information Technology (IBIT), where participants solve important industry-specific problems using data. This year’s 245 entries were judged in two categories—analytics and graphics—and winners took home $12,000 in cash prizes from the event, held Nov. 13, 2017 at Alter Hall, home of the Fox School of Business.
The winner of the graphics category was a team consisting of Charles Attisano and Luke Harding, two seniors studying graphic and interactive design at the Tyler School of Art. They worked on the NBCUniversal challenge about movie box office forecasting and produced a short video exploring the topic, which you can watch here.
“We concluded that, on average, the highest performing movies in the box office tend to be adventure films with production budgets between $100-250 million, and release dates in May, June, or December,” said Attisano and Harding. “Providing a formula for success, on average, may help a producer choose a genre, budget, and release date. One of the most important things we learned in the process is that storytelling is an integral part of the analyzing process, and that you must communicate your analysis in a clear manner.”
The winner in the analytics category was a team of four Fox School students majoring in management information systems: Ngoc Pham, Chi Pham, Run Zhu, and Jiawei Huang. They focused on QVC’s e-commerce problem, and showed how the shopping network can ship the right products at the right time to its customers. (See the winning infographic here.)
“Working with raw data is like playing a video game,” the team explained. “You have the same goal to fulfill certain tasks, and there are tons of approaches that can be used to accomplish this goal. We provided our recommendations for highly underutilized distribution centers in terms of product categories based on their sales. By implementing our recommendations, QVC could increase its sales volume in California, Texas, and Florida within three months.”
One of the most thrilling aspects of the Analytics Challenge is that participants represent many different schools and colleges across the university. This means teams approach data, analysis, and visualization in diverse ways, and they bring unique, multi-disciplinary insights to each problem.
“It was exciting this year to see how well so many students from so many different majors instinctively understood the importance of the science of data,” said Laurel Miller, assistant professor of management information systems, IBIT director, and the co-founder of the Analytics Challenge. “It was hard to pick the winners, and all the students should feel proud of how well they did.”
Learn more about the Temple University Analytics Challenge.
See all of the winning entries here.
IBIT Annual Report 2016-2017
Dear colleagues,
It is my pleasure to present the 2016-17 annual report of the Institute for Business and Information Technology (IBIT) of the Fox School of Business, Temple University.
The IBIT partnership with nationally recognized member firms and the Fox IT advisory board is quickly becoming the standard for industry-academic engagement. Please read the report to learn more.
Sincerely,
Munir Mandviwalla
Executive Director
