WBS Professor Duncan Shaw has secured funding from the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) for the research project “Considering the involvement of convergent volunteers during major floods”. The project started in October 2013 and will continue until the end of October 2014.

Duncan explained, “This project will identify and explore the dimensions that emergency planners should consider when deciding whether or not to embed convergent volunteers into their official response. At present there is no official guidance on the involvement of convergent volunteers during emergencies. This research will therefore engage with the relevant key stakeholders from the public and voluntary sectors to identify and validate potential dimensions that may inform national policy on volunteer involvement in the response to major flood events.”

The first stage of the research will scope the operational challenges associated with the involvement of volunteers in emergency response. The second stage will identify the potential dimensions that planners may need to consider when involving volunteers through a review of the policy context and academic/practitioner literature bases as well as a series of interviews with key stakeholder involved in the management and coordination of both organised and convergent volunteers.

Further information about the project can be found by clicking on the link Convergent volunteer project

Time: 5:30-7:30 pm on Wednesday 20th November 2013
Venue: D2.04 Staff Lounge, Social Science Building, University of Warwick

If you are considering studying for a PhD in the area of Operational Research and Management Sciences after the completion of your current degree, you are cordially invited to our PhD Open Evening.

We will give an overview of our PhD program, have presentations by faculty members of the Operational Research & Management Sciences Group about potential research topics, outline funding possibilities and the application process and have plenty of time for you to have an informal chat with potential supervisors.

You may want to explore our research profile at
http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/wbs/subjects/orms/
For catering purposes, if you plan to attend, please send a confirmation email to
orms@wbs.ac.uk

Dr Arne Strauss, Assistant Professor of Operational Research in the ORMS group, has won the Operational Research Society’s Goodeve medal for best paper published in the Journal of the Operational Research Society in 2012.

The award was made for his paper on revenue optimisation that he co-authored with two practitioners from Lufthansa Systems Berlin, Germany.

This award was named in memory of Sir Charles Goodeve, one of the founders and pioneers of civilian Operational Research after World War 2, and a leader for many years of the OR Club and Society. The Goodeve Medal is awarded in recognition of the most outstanding contribution to the philosophy, theory or practice of OR published in the Journal of the OR Society or OR Insight, within the relevant year.

Speaker:
Dr Jonathan Fieldsend
Title:
Visualising data with Pareto relationships
Date:
Wednesday 9th October 2013
Venue:
Room E2:02, Warwick Business School, Social Sciences Building
Time:
14:00 hrs.

Download: abstract and brief biography

In a joint effort between IBM volunteers and members of the Operational Research & Management Science (ORMS) Group at the triple-accredited Warwick Business School (WBS), we have embarked on the development of an entirely new module “Analytics in Practice” on the technology needed for big data analytics.

“Analytics in Practice” will become a core module for the M.Sc. in Business Analytics & Consulting program at WBS and will complement the methodological training that WBS is currently offering in that it will impart knowledge on business intelligence and on the IBM software tools that are specifically tailored to big data applications such as BigSheets (front end for Apache Hadoop), Cognos or SPSS Modeler.

Links between IBM and WBS have traditionally been tight; in fact, Warwick was the first European IBM partner university, established at the time by Ian Nussey and IBM Fellow Tony Temple, who is still a Board member of WBS. E.g., a distance-learning MBA program was devised exclusively for IBM staff which has 100 students per annum. WBS is keen to collaborate with industry in both research and teaching; we aim for about 10% of each M.Sc. program to be taught by practitioners.

“Analytics in Practice” will aim to familiarize students with practical aspects of big data analytics such as the types of data, their structure and the data lifecycle. Data sources, extraction, cleansing and manipulation as well as dashboarding and visualization are further business intelligence topics that will be covered. Students will be exposed to real-world analytical applications via case studies in IBM’s focus areas like smarter cities and improving business performance, and they will learn about technical challenges.

The module’s content is central knowledge required for job roles like Data Scientists, Business Analysts and Visual Analysts, and we expect that the use of Big Data software tools such as Cognos, SPSS and Big Insights on realistic data sets will increase the students’ real-world awareness and further improve their employability.

As well as focusing on current IBM software offerings, the course will look to analyze emerging trends in the field and look specifically at the new generation of knowledge and learning systems that are being built from a foundation of unstructured data, predictive technology and analytical capability such as IBM Watson. Students as well as understanding the underlying components of such a system will be challenged to think about new fields where such systems can be deployed and to explore the business, ethical and process challenges that such systems introduce.