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Showing posts from September, 2010

AA Problem

AA stands for Attention Allocation not Alcoholic Anonymous. Sorry for the deceiving eye catcher. PTT presentation is work I did in 2005 in the purely abstract edges of Operation Research. I uploaded a PPT presentation. The presentation is lighter and more colorful than the actual article. Warning you have to be a bit of a geek to press the link above. For the super geeks I put a link to the full article. It’s called “Attention Allocation to Partially Observable Heterogeneous Customers – with Imperfect Treatment”, Catchy? Full AA Problem article

Sleepless Summer Nights - Certificate Design Challenge

Another System Design and Management certificate program started this summer. The event ended with a robot design challenge which I managed along with Hamid and Kandarp. With just three organizers there was lots of work but it was a rewarding experience. This is a part of an article that appeared in the SDM alumni newsletter: “Certificate students spent the last two days of the workshop completing the Design Challenge (DC) Competition. SDM Fellows - Kandarp Bhatt, Avi Latner, and Hamid Salim - designed this challenge using the latest LEGO Mindstorm NXT kit with several stages of events having increasing difficulty. A primary premise of this particular exercise was that the events stressed different (sometimes conflicting) performance requirements, forcing teams to perform critical design tradeoffs. This year's teams exhibited outstanding inter-team collaboration during the long hours of the DC process. First place Design Challenge winners were: Nick Biersdorf, Brad Hitchler, ...

Tips on Getting Started with a Thesis

A thesis is one of the advantages System Design and Management has over other professional degrees such as MBA. However, it is not structured like course work and it can take a lot of work to get started on the right thesis. There are three key decisions to a thesis: a topic, an advisor and a company (optional). Since you’ve got to start somewhere I started by choosing a topic and then pitching to professors hoping they would use their connections to find a company. It didn’t work. After several iterations I changed strategy and started with a company. Getting a company to collaborate wasn’t easy, but once that was done the other pieces fell neatly into place. Another option is to work without a company. An advantage to this approach is that you are more independent. Keep in mind that an independent thesis must rely on publicly available data sources. In engineering most of the data isn’t public but the front end of systems (finished product, website, mobile apps, standards, ...