Savvy Avi

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

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, ...

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, ...

Service companies use branches, phone, kiosks and web as direct channels to customers. In recent years service companies added a new channel - the smart phone application. Smart phones differ from PCs in screen size, ease of typing and input, connection speed and use context. Keeping these changes in mind, mobile apps shouldn’t be a replica of their online counterparts. One difference is that the mobile app has to be leaner. Another difference is that mobile apps should have unique features, such as location based features, taking advantage of mobile capabilities. As a case study, I compared the online website and mobile app of Citibank ’s card services. As shown below the mobile app has fewer pages (17 vs. 84) and has fewer levels (4 deep vs. 6 deep). Companies rushed to create iPhone and android apps often not doing it “right”. Mobile operation system defragmentation and rapid market changes make doing it right all the more challenging. That may be the reason why Citibank’s iPhon...

Dan Ariely a behavioral economist from Duke mentions System Design and Management in his new book “The Upside of Irrationality”. In his book, a sequel to the New York Times bestseller “Predictably Irrational”, Ariely intertwines research with personal stories including stories of his time as a “lowly assistant professor at MIT”. The story begins with “here is a story of a time when I lost my own temper” and describes a dispute between Ariely and a revered professor of finance, a former dean of Sloan, code named Paul, over a scheduling conflict of SDM classes. SDM students are described as curious and, reportedly, Ariely enjoyed teaching them. This story is just an anecdote used as a preface to a chapter on fleeting emotions followed by impulsive acts. Ariely and his fellow behavioral economists construct amusing research to expose how we humans continuously fail to behave rationally. In these experiments subjects fold origami frogs, build Lego robots, put their hand in close to b...

Jay Forrester , the founder of System Dynamics, a man regarded by many as a legend, was a guest lecturer in SDM ’s System Design class. At 92, Forrester is still relentless at finding the true implications of public policies through system dynamic simulations and working to correct policy. His work in the 70’s and onwards on the limits to growth led him to believe that people are consuming and growing beyond the world’s capacity and that disastrous consequences will follow. The implication of this belief is harsh; humanity should stop striving for growth and instead maintain a net growth of zero. Most extreme opinions are a product of dichotomous “black and white” thinking. This case is entirely different. Extensive research, innovation and his boldness to face an unpleasant revelation created this extreme view. Forester realizes that it is futile to lobby for such changes. Policy makers cannot radically change the direction of policy without a strong support of constituents. T...

eMbrace venture which I am a part of started as a project in Product Design and Development class. It is mentioned in the last SDM pulse in an article by the class's professor Qi Van Eikema Hommes: “one team in this year’s class started out with a technology—an RFID tracking device—rather than a need. Team members wanted to design a web-based system to track everything from documents to parts and information. In class, the students were urged to find out why the world would want their system. Using techniques learned in class, they interviewed and observed people, ultimately identifying a need among parents who sometimes lose their young children in busy areas. The team felt that these parents would like anyone who finds their child to be able to contact them quickly. Based on this need, the students developed an attractive RFID bracelet for kids and a companion web-based tracking system. The team is now exploring the possibility of collaborating with Verizon to produce such a sy...