iNDICA NEWS BUREAU-
Professor Srikanth Jagabathula, a faculty member at the NYU Stern School of Business, has been honored with the prestigious Faculty Early Career Development Award (CAREER) from the National Science Foundation (NSF).
As part of this esteemed award, Jagabathula, an IIT Bombay alumnus, will receive USD 500,000 over the next five years to advance his research on data-driven modeling and learning techniques aimed at improving the accuracy of operational decision-making.
The NSF’s CAREER Program is one of its most competitive and prestigious initiatives, designed to support junior faculty members who demonstrate excellence in both research and education while integrating both within the mission of their institutions.
Jagabathula’s research focuses on developing accessible techniques for making better managerial decisions across various areas, such as product design, pricing, and inventory management. Traditional methods typically involve selecting and fitting models to data or efficiently solving decision problems using pre-existing models, often leaving the selection of the model to an expert.
However, these approaches do not scale well for modern retail settings, which feature complex and varied demand patterns, diverse products, and multiple types of data such as purchase transactions, click-streams, browsing behavior, and product dwell times.
Instead, Jagabathula’s research aims to combine machine learning, statistics, and operations research to create a new method that starts with a specific type of data (e.g., purchase transactions, marketing surveys, or insurance policy choices) and ends with actionable operational decisions. This integrated approach will allow businesses to automatically select and apply the most suitable model for their data and decision-making needs, offering a more efficient and scalable solution.
(Photo courtesy: www.stern.nyu.edu)
