Here at the Analytics Lab @ OU we would like to wish you all a happy holiday season, a wonderful winter break, and a feliz año nuevo!
Also, we have had some nice developments over the last few days and weeks and I would like to mention these briefly.
Congratulations!
Congratulations to Param Tripathi for succesfully defending his Masters thesis and completing his MS in ISE!
In his thesis entitled “ANALYSIS OF RESILIENCE IN US STOCK MARKETS DURING NATURAL DISASTERS” Param analyzes how major hurricane events impact the stock market in the United States. In particular, he looks at two fundamental elements of resilience, vulnerability and recoverability, as it applies to the Property and Casualty Insurance sector by evaluating the price volatility with respect to the overall New York Stock Exchange. He applies breakout detection to study patterns in the time series data and uses this to quantify key resilience metrics.
Congratulations to Alexandra Amidon for successfully completing her Industry practicum on anomaly detection using a compression algorithm. Well done!
Good luck!
Next, Weili Zhang, a PhD Candidate in ISE, is actively interviewing with a vast number of top companies for data science positions. He has passed first and second round interviews for a number of companies and has been invited for face-to-face interviews with Facebook, Google, Ebay, Verizon, Disney, Lyft, Amazon, Target, and several more. Getting past round one with these companies is already a major accomplishment — round two or three get progressively more intense! Good job and good luck Weili!
Yay us!
The Analytics Lab team members have had a few papers published or accepted for publication recently:
- Almoghathawi, Y., K. Barker, C.M. Rocco, and C. Nicholson. 2017. A multi-criteria decision analysis approach for importance ranking of network components. Reliability Engineering and System Safety, 158: 142-151 LINK [bibTex]
- Nicholson, C., L. Goodwin, and C. Clark. 2016. Variable neighborhood search for reverse engineering of gene regulatory networks. Journal of Biomedical Informatics, 65:120-131 LINK [bibTex]
- Zhang, W., N. Wang, and C. Nicholson. 2016. Resilience-based post-disaster recovery strategies for community road-bridge networks. Accepted in Structure and Infrastructure Engineering.
I’ll write up a post about these exciting new research articles soon!
Data Science Interviews
Weili, along with a few other current and former students have been describing the data science interview processes and questions with me. My plan is to write up a blog post summarizing a some key things for those of you seeking DSA positions to keep in mind and prepare for. Fortunately, many of the questions/topics asked about are covered in the ISE 5103 Intelligent Data Analytics class offered in the Fall semester. If you are starting to look for data science jobs now or in the near future, make sure you check out that post!
Life in Industry
Additionally, I have asked several current/former students (Pete Pelter, Leslie Goodwin, Cyril Beyney, Olivia Peret) who are employed in data science positions to provide some descriptions and information about life in industry. Look for that series of posts soon!
ISE 5113 Advanced Analytics and Metaheuristics
I am currently preparing for the online launch of the ISE 5113 Advanced Analytics and Metaheuristics course to be offered in Spring 2017. The course will be offered both online and on-campus. This is one of my favorite courses to teach. The introductory video should be posted soon! The course fills up very fast, so if you are a DSA or ISE student make sure to register ASAP if you haven’t already!
Soccer
I have had excellent response from so many people this semester that it looks like “yes!” we will have enough people to start a soccer team in the Spring. I’ll be providing more information next month. The season starts in March and the official signups are in February ($80 each). We need a team name and team colors — so I’ll be open for ideas! In the meantime, get out there and practice!
Finally…
I hope everyone has an excellent winter break. Enjoy your family, enjoy good food, stay warm, practice some soccer, catch up on sleep, maybe study a little bit… and I’ll see you next year!