Past weekend, I travelled to Houston, TX to attend #DSI Annual Conference and Expo. I like to keep my conference trip mixed with activities like exploring city on foot, meeting new people, and catching up with oldies but goodies friends. But, first things first, the conference:
This was my fifth attendance to DSI conference in a row, I was given a 5 year attendee ribbon. I was excited and a bit nervous to give 2 talks about my service learning projects that I integrated in Business Analytics I in this semester. I arranged a service learning project with Beyond Housing in St. Louis. Who they are?
“We are a comprehensive community development organization convening partners and providing leadership. From purchasing a home to health, education, jobs, and economic development, we offer holistic resources and support.”
We were given various datasets to assess how well BH is doing in terms of providing support and services to their clients in many areas including housing, education, healthcare, childcare support, etc. You can check my previous post about this Service Learning integration to have more information. I gave a workshop on how to integrate service learning in an analytics course and presented a related research proposal on how to assess the impact of service learning on students growth?
Workshop: Integrating Service Learning into Analytics Education: Best Practices and Lessons Learned
Research Presentation: Could We Make Business Analytics Courses More Engaging and Impactful with Service Learning? May be, yes! A Comparative Investigation
I received numerous positive feedback about the presentations and it was great finding other colleagues integrating service learning in various courses.
It was good to see old friends, spent good quality time friends from various institutions in the US. We had great food initially at Pinkerton’s Barbecue, then Tempura Indi-Pakistani and lastly at Tourão Brazilian restaurant. All are recommended in the order of: Tourão, Pinkerton’s and Tempura…Flying back was a bit challenging with a delayed flight but now, I am back safe and working to wrap up fall 2022, then have a reflection about 2022 in the holidays.
I have been developing service learning projects and integrating into undergraduate and graduate courses since 2016. Service learning can be immensely beneficial for both instructor and students on courses where the degree of complexity or abstract knowledge could be like barrier between the learner and the course. So, in this post, I would like to share one of my recent applications of SLP at Lindenwood University.
What is service learning? Service learning is defined as “ a credit-bearing, educational, experience in which students participate in an organized service activity that meets identified community needs and reflects on the service activity in such a way as to gain further understanding of course content, a broader appreciation of the discipline, and an enhanced sense of civic responsibility. (Bringle & Hatcher,1995).”
Service Learning Project: Service learning can be modeled with variety of ways in a course. One of the ways to integrate SL is through service learning project. Student teams will work on a mini or semester long project to provide a predefined output in the end.
There are typically 3 stakeholders in a service learning project: Students, Instructor, and Community partner. In an ideal service learning project, the academic content and the community need should be matched effectively and efficiently on a well-prepared service learning project plan, so that students could apply the academic knowledge to the community need and provide reflection on their learning (See the 3 pillars of service learning below)
Why service learning could be beneficial for students, instructor, and community in a Business Analytics courses?
Despite having an overwhelming amount of theoretical methods, which challenges students and creates fears prior to learning, business analytics courses can be quite easily linked with service learning projects. Because, nowadays, almost every organization collects and works on data to improve their operations and decision making. Thus, SL can be beneficial for the three main stakeholders: students, instructor, community partner. First of all, if scaffolded properly, service learning project experience can be highly related to the course because of the following reasons:
1) Students will be collecting and/or analyzing data about a previously defined research question that is important to be answered for a local or global nonprofit organization. The problem and data can be provided a bit ill structured to increase the rigor of the project.
2) Students can apply various business analytics methods and model validation techniques in order to assist with decision making or decision support for local or global nonprofit organizations.
3) All in all, students will be putting into practice the acquired knowledge in the class systematically for the project and the project tasks and meetings with mentors will enable them to develop a variety of professional skills and disseminate the findings of the projects with the specific community through online and onsite presentations.
Reflection: Reflection is critical part of service learning. Therefore, specific attention will be paid in this course towards making sure that students are reflecting the abovementioned knowledge and skills gained this course at the end and they will utilize from now on in their personal and professional life. To do so, there will be frequent meetings between project groups and mentors where students will be asked about how they can utilize the knowledge and skills gained for the projects. So, the interactive meetings will be playing a critical role for initiating the reflection. Discussions, presentations, Q&A sessions, the project report, and the online published content will be predominantly used as the strategies for reflection.
Length of Service: Students typically spend about 10-12 weeks and 2-3 hours per week on the service-learning project. Typical project steps and timeline are also included in this document.
An example of SLP timeline from my Fall 2022 Business Analytics Undergraduate Course
Assessment of SLP
Once completed, SLPs can be assessed with various approaches depending on the output type. Most of the time I had asked students to write a project report and presentation. I recently switched to only providing a presentation to the community partner with supporting files. Here is an example of my expected presentation content:
PowerPoint presentation organization will be as follows:
Introduction of the Team
Introduction of the Project Plan (How the work is planned, task listed, distributed, contribution of each member, etc.)
Research Questions
Introduction of Data
Business Analytics Applications:
Data preparation (Cleaning, modification, etc. as needed)Data Visualization (Necessary data visualizations to help understand/study data and RQ better)
Other methods (Correlation analysis, regression, pivot tables, Tableau visualization, etc. as needed).
Summary of findings
Recommendations to Beyond Housing
Story of Project Execution (pictures, videos are helpful)
Past week, I travelled to Seattle to attend #IISE Annual Conference and Expo. This is the largest meeting of industrial and systems engineers in the world, and I had been involved with the Sustainable Development Division for the last 10+ years.
It was the first in person conference, I attended prior to the Pandemic. I flew with #AlaskaAirlines from Saint Louis, MO to Seattle, WA with a direct flight. Wifi was good along with a large group of movie, etc. selections, while I like to read or rest during flights. Overall, the flight was comfortable back and forth despite being 3+ hours long. I packed small and went with 1 back pack and 1 small bag, no luggage. I try to learn and practice as much as I can on minimalism, which is I believe crucial for a happy and calm life. What do you think about minimalism? [Feel free to comment below]
I keep my conference activities mixed with leisure things like wondering around, meeting new people, and catching up with oldies but goodies friends.
Town Hall Meeting
I had the opportunity to meet many colleagues from #SustainableDevelopment Division at Institute of Industrial and Systems Engineers. I stepped down from President role of Sustainable Development Division after a year of happy and fun service experience. We had such a good turn out at the conference despite being the first in person meeting after a couple of years. People seemed to be really missed the in person meetings. I had the pleasure to announce the best paper (Stephanie González), best student paper (Mehrsa Khaleghi), and best sustainable development service (Massachusetts Port Authority (MASSPORT) awards.
A cool coffee shop in downtown Seattle! I discovered this while walking on the streets of downtown. It is “Top Pot Doughnuts“. Their doughnuts are otherworldly delicious! And, sure, you will get a great coffee when you are in Seattle. One of my dream todo is to open a book coffee shop like this, so inspiring!
I gave a talk about the research project, “Layer Analysis of U.S. Manufacturing and its Global Supply Chains: A Multi-Region Input-Output Analysis Approach” lead by two of my former graduate research assistants Durva Joshi and Meet Panchal. [Link to the presentation] I shared our initial results and had some more work to do, I am in the look out to recruit research assistants and/or find collaborators to move these projects further. Reach out if you are interested in collaborating!
More importantly, in almost every talk I gave about sustainability, I share the slide of CO2 PPM trend as you see below in the first slide of talk. The safety level is 350 and see where we are at based on NASA’s analysis. I pause and let people contemplate, to me this is like a ritual now… I go back and see what I can do myself in combating climate change, educating and helping with the awareness. What do you think about climate change?
On the last day, I had the opportunity to moderate the session entitled “UN SDG 13 – Climate Action: Take urgent action to combat climate change and its impacts” on Tuesday May 24 – 12:30 PM to 1:50 PM block, which had four talks.
I got to see my old friend and colleague Dr. Can (John) Celikbilek, PhD and other colleagues, my former professors from Ohio University including Dr. Dusan Sormaz [Happy Retirement Dr.!]. Anthony’s is a great sea food place – check out the salmon, when you are there especially on May-June period, according to my local friend John [Forza Inter bud!]
Funny and great fact: after starting at Lindenwood as of 2022, both my university’s and my fav soccer team’s (Galatasaray) mascot became Lion! Cant be happier 🙂 [Sari, Kirmizi, En Buyuk Cimbom!]
Well, I am now fully recharged and ready for the summer! See you on the next post…
Dr. Seydibeyoglu is currently a visiting professor at University of Main. He introduce the state of art research, technology and applications of Nanocellulose, and discussed potential implications on future sustainable development plans and goals worldwide.
Future is bright with these disruptive, environmentally friendly and circular material practices. They can be also cheap at a competitive level while their use and functional properties need to meet the industry standards such as use of nanocellulose in car parts, etc.
We would like to thank Dr. Seydibeyoglu for his excellent seminar and sharing his time with us again.
Dr. Celikbilek is currently working at T-Mobile as Business Intelligence Manager. His seminar was focused on Data Science and Business Intelligence Applications in E-commerce and Tech Industry.
Dr. Celikbilek shared his recent projects that focused on application of machine learning, dashboarding, and data viz techniques on various e-commerce problems including prediction of sales, shipment time, and vendor clustering and classification from clothing, communication, and supply chain / logistics industries. Some of the key takeaways are:
Business understanding is far more important than having knowledge and skillset of business analytics and data science.
His suggested set of tools include python, SQL, tableau and PowerBI in addition to solid MS Excel knowledge and skills for working on large scale business analytics and intelligence projects.
As companies get bigger, the problems become more complex and required datasets, their volume, variety, veracity and value become more and more important and increase.
Business analytics tools, methods, knowledge and skills become more indispensable assets for new graduates to have and keep building up on as the industries get connected to each other globally more in depth.
We would like to thank Can for his excellent seminar and sharing his time with us again.
Dr. Gedik gave a research talk, which is an extension of our former research assistant Lu Bai’s thesis project on 11/24/2021 at the 2021 DSI Annual Meeting. The presentation was entitled “What It Takes to Win or Lose A Soccer Game? A Machine Learning Approach to Understand the Impact of Game and Team Statistics” and presentation can be accessed at this link.
In this research, we focused on building machine learning models to predict soccer game outcomes in five major soccer leagues, and extract knowledge on what factors play biggest role in winning and losing a soccer game over a 5 season data.
We would like to thank Lu for her excellent thesis work again.
Dr. Zouggar gave a webinar in EGRM/INDE 6641 Supply Chain Management course on November 19, 2021. The seminar is entitled “Production Optimization Through Lean Implementation in The Era of Industry 4.0“.
Anne is an Associate Professor at the University of Bordeaux. She
started studying Economy at the university of Moscow, and then
transitioned to Industrial Systems Optimization at the university of
Toulouse. She received her PhD In Production/Logistics from University
of Bordeaux. Anne has published more than 30 publications in
conferences, books, and international journals. She focused mainly on
Aeronautics and Automotive Industries, which falls under Manufacturing Systems Optimization, Supply Chain Management, and development of new models to sustain Lean Production Deployment. She is also member of IFIP working group 5.7, and involved in various projects:
• I4EU: Industry 4.0 for EUROPE to build a handbook, showcases and virtual Lab for European learners. She is a leader of
work package Industrial Showcases in France. She collaborates with Dassault and Faurécia.
• GT4.0: she belongs to working Group in the department to lead an active thinking about the future master program
transformation to fit industry 4.0 expectations.
• In charge of Developing serious game “Case Study Digital Kanban in Automotive Industry”
We would like to thank deeply Dr. Anne Zouggar, Associate Professor of Associate Professor, University of Bordeaux. IMS Lab for sharing her recent research and industry consulting projects with our students and researchers.
Dr. Egilmez gave a webinar in DENG 626 Modeling and Simulation course at Qatar University on 11/03/2021. The seminar is entitled “Application of Stochastic Optimization and Simulation Models to Yatai SERU and Assembly Lines” and presentation can be accessed at this link.
Slide1
Zoom Session
Simulation model: SERU
Simulation model: Assembly Line
Dr. Suer – Thanks
We would like to thank deeply Dr. Murat Kucukvar, Associate Professor of Industrial Engineering & Operations Management at Qatar University, for the kind invitation and hospitality, and thanks to friends in DENG 626 Modeling and Simulation course.
Dr. Egilmez gave a webinar at University of Bordeaux, France on 6/10/2021. The seminar is entitled “Energy and Manufacturing Nexus and Policy Implications of Industry 4.0 on Sustainability” and can be accessed at this link.
We would like to thank deeply Dr. Anne Zouggar Amrani, Associate Professor Researcher at IMS – Research Unit of CNRS at University of Bordeaux, for the kind invitation and hospitality.
Sami Khalafallah started working on this project in Fall 2020 as EGAP research assistant with Dr. Egilmez. The conference paper, entitled ” A Stochastic Mixed Integer Linear Programming Approach to Skill-based Workforce Allocation in Serus”, was presented virtually in Manufacturing and Design Track at the 2021 IISE Annual Conference on May 23rd, 2021 5:00-5:20PM.
The research focused on developing optimization models to optimize the production output of SERU systems and compare it with traditional assembly lines by using stochastic Mixed Integer Linear Programming Models.
We congratulate Sami for his work and presentation. Presentation can be accessed here.
ASOS 