Jagabathula is an alum of IIT Bombay, MIT.
AB Wire
NEW YORK: Dr. Srikanth Jagabathula, an assistant professor in the Information, Operations, & Management Sciences department (IOMS) at the New York University Stern School of Business was recently recognized by the National Science Foundation (NSF) with its Faculty Early Career Development Award (CAREER), which will see him receive a total of $500,000 over the next five years to further his research in developing data-driven modeling and learning techniques with the goal of improving the accuracy of operational decision making.
CAREER is a highly competitive, foundation-wide activity that offers the NSF’s most prestigious awards in support of junior faculty who exemplify the role of teacher-scholars through outstanding research, excellent education, and the integration of education and research within the context of the mission of their organizations, according to a press release.
“We are proud of Professor Jagabathula’s research and the recognition it has received from the National Science Foundation,” said Peter Henry, dean of NYU Stern, in a statement. “This award speaks to the quality and impact of his work as well as NYU Stern’s leadership in research at the intersection of data mining, business intelligence, and digital information.”
Jagabathula’s research is expected to lead to easy-to-use techniques for a wide range of managerial decisions: the right products to design, the right products and prices to offer to customers, and the right quantity of each product to carry.
Traditional approaches have focused either on selecting an appropriate model and fitting it to the data or on efficiently solving a decision problem when given the model, leaving the model selection itself to an expert. Neither approach scales to current retail applications, which are characterized by diverse demand patterns, products, and types of data (purchase transactions, click-streams, browsing patterns, dwell times on products, etc.)
Jagabathula’s research will instead blend techniques from machine learning, statistics, and operations to design an approach that starts with a type of data (purchase transactions, click-streams, marketing studies, choice of insurance policies, etc.) and ends with an operational decision. The integrated approach will work “out-of-the-box” by automatically selecting a model customized to the data and the decision. By limiting the need for expert input, the results of the research is expected to democratize access to methodologies, much as Google and Amazon have democratized access to computational infrastructure.
“It is a great accomplishment for Srikanth Jagabathula to win the NSF CAREER Award on his very first try,” said Alex Tuzhilin, IOMS department chair, in a statement. “He is the fourth professor in our department to be honored with this award in the past eight years. Their collective research demonstrates the IOMS department’s deep competency and strength in the areas of business analytics and data-driven decision making.”
An alum of IIT Bombay, Jagabathula received his PhD from the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.