Personal Mention

Heinz College faculty member Rahul Telang and Abhinav Maurya (l-r), a Ph.D. candidate in information systems, have received a $25,000 research grant from LinkedIn for their proposal “Your Next Big Move: Personalized Data-Driven Career Making.” Their proposal focuses on developing ways in which individuals in the workforce can harness data available on LinkedIn to acquire additional skills to obtain upward mobility in their careers. “Many employees in the workforce are dissatisfied with their jobs despite being good at what they do, due to a lack of engaging challenges in their day-to-day work. If we can identify skills that would make them desirable for more challenging careers in a data-driven yet explanatory fashion, it could help millions of people lead more productive professional careers," Maurya said. In addition to receiving a $25,000 research grant from LinkedIn, Maurya and Telang will have the opportunity to work with valuable professional data under the supervision and guidance of a LinkedIn employee mentor, before presenting their findings to LinkedIn executives in December. Telang says that he hopes the project will open doors for future collaborations with LinkedIn. Find out more.

Beibei Li, assistant professor of information systems and management at the Heinz College, was named a recipient of both the Google Research Award and the Adobe Digital Marketing Research Award for her research project "Combining Machine Learning with Randomized Field Experiments to Improve Mobile Advertising." Li’s research on smartphone usage and social media made her the ideal recipient of both awards. Her proposal looks to combine individual users’ online social media and social network information together with their offline mobility trajectory information to better understand individual behavior and preferences. This large-scale and fine-grained data from mobile and sensor technologies can help platforms like Google and Adobe to design better mobile recommendation strategies to improve the overall user digital experiences and business marketing strategies. “In our research, we propose a new mobile recommendation strategy that is able to link user social and individual behavioral trajectories via both online and offline channels. It not only extracts user preferences from a large variety of online social networks, but also leverages full information on users’ physical trajectories,” Li said. Find out more.

The Human-Computer Interaction Institute will add three assistant professors to its world-class faculty in August.

Geof Kaufman, who earned his bachelor's degree in psychology from CMU and a Ph.D. in computer science at The Ohio State University, comes to CMU via Dartmouth, where he's currently a postdoc at the college's Tiltfactor game design and research laboratory. His research focuses on how fictional, simulated and mediated experiences can build interpersonal understanding and empathy, reduce stereotypes and prejudice, and inspire higher levels of social consciousness and civic engagement.

Chinmay Kulkarni recently received a Ph.D. in computer science from Stanford University, where his research allowed him to create tools and techniques that enable students to learn better through interactions with peers, both in online and traditional class environments. He served on the Program Committee of the new ACM conference on Learning @ Scale, and was recognized as a 2014 Siebel Scholar.

John Stamper joined the HCII's research faculty in 2009 as a systems scientist after earning his Ph.D. in computer science from the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. His research efforts at CMU have focused on using big data from educational systems to improve learning. He is also the lead researcher behind the Pittsburgh Science of Learning Center (PSLC) DataShop — the world's largest central repository for data on the interactions between students and educational software, and a suite of tools to analyze that data.

Kulkarni and Stamper will be part of CMU’s Simon Initiative, a strategic, university-wide effort to harness learning science research and the latest in technology to improve learning outcomes for all students.

Four members of the Finance Division were highlighted in the June 2015 issue of Business Officer Magazine, a publication distributed by the National Association of College and University Business Officers (NACUBO). Sharing their insights were:

• Carrie Nelson, AVP of International Finance;
• Kathy Proch, Associate Controller;
• Deanne Weaver, AVP of Financial Systems; and
• Amir Rahnamay-Azar, Vice President for Finance and Chief Financial Officer.

The article, “Complexity Made Simple,” discussed how CMU’s global locations gain efficiency and increase functionality utilizing the financial system based at its Pittsburgh campus. Nelson, Proch, Weaver and Rahnamay-Azar spoke to the challenges of global expansion, ways in which the Finance team and university adapted, the global gains that resulted from this growth and the quality controls set in place to monitor long-term success.