Carnegie Mellon University in Qatar announces leadership symposium

Notes and media contacts

About Carnegie Mellon University in Qatar:
Carnegie Mellon University in Qatar is the first international branch campus operated by Carnegie Mellon University, a private American research university with a distinctive mix of programs in computer science, robotics, engineering, the sciences, business, public policy, fine arts and the humanities. In August 2004 Carnegie Mellon Qatar began offering its internationally recognized undergraduate programs in business and computer science at the invitation of the Qatar Foundation. Joining Texas A&M University, Virginia Commonwealth University and Weill Cornell Medical College, Carnegie Mellon plans to open a new facility on the Education City campus in 2007.

Two concurrent sessions will feature Carnegie Mellon experts in IT and business. The sessions are:

Session I
Tepper School of Business
Academic Panel: "Managing in a Global Market"

R. Ravi, Ph.D., Professor of Operations Research and Computer Science;
Director, Center for Analytical Research in Technology (CART)
"The Intersection of Business and Technology"

The mission of the Tepper School of Business at Carnegie Mellon is to own the space where business and technology intersect. Ravi will describe what this might mean, specifically in the context of the research carried out by the faculty. He will also describe the formation and activities of the new Center for Analytical Research in Technology (CART) of which he is the founding director.

Time permitting, Ravi will describe ongoing research in optimization at Carnegie Mellon, specifically by the faculty in the Operations Research group at Tepper, and more broadly across campus.

Lester Lave, Ph.D., the Harry B. and James H. Higgins Professor of Economics and University Professor;
Director, Green Design Institute
"Tools for Estimating the Life Cycle Resource and Environmental Implications of Products and Services"

Analysts and governments have come to realize that an analysis of the life cycle use of the materials and energy going into a product or service is necessary to understand how to improve environmental quality and make the product or service more sustainable. Lave will review the two standard methods for life-cycle analysis, as well as a hybrid method and show examples of the analysis for various products and services.

Sunder Kekre, Ph.D., Professor of Operations Management and Manufacturing;
Director, Center for E-Business Innovation
"Decision Technologies for Network-Centric Global Operations"

Value chains for several commodities and industrial products are becoming increasingly global and driven by technology. Activities such as development, manufacturing, logistics and sales functions have to be integrated across multiple partners and countries leveraging technology enabled processes. Research at the Tepper School addresses competencies at both strategic and tactical levels to bridge demand and supply chain management in such network-centric enterprises. These predictive analytics approaches to create business intelligence architectures should help develop strategies and execution systems for network mastery in the emerging Qatar LNG supply chains.

Duane Seppi, Ph.D., Professor of Financial Economics
"Managing Commodity Risk"

Fluctuations in the demand and supply for oil, natural gas, metals and other physical commodities represent major risks in the global economy. Recent advances in option pricing theory have led to improved models for pricing and hedging both commodity-linked financial derivative securities and also real options such as pipelines and oil fields. Seppi will describe two approaches to commodity-linked derivatives following the discussion in his survey article, Seppi (2002). The first is reduced-form modelling, as in Schwartz and Smith (2000). The second is a structural economics approach, as in Routledge, Seppi and Spatt (2000).

Session II
IT and Computing Academic Experts Panel:
"The Role of Information Technology in Education"

Moderator: Randal E. Bryant, Ph.D., Dean and University Professor in the School of Computer Science

Raj Reddy, Ph.D., the Simon University Professor of Computer Science and Robotics, School of Computer Science
"Grand Challenges in IT for the Emerging Economies"

The grand challenges in IT for the emerging economies are universal availability, accessibility and affordability of information and communication technologies to the four billion people who subsist on less than $2,000 per year income. This talk will review why the world's poor have more to gain in relative terms from this technology than the affluent nations of the world and review the barriers that make it difficult to realize the potential benefits. Universal availability, accessibility and affordability will in turn require solutions to the four "Cs" of the Information Society: "connectivity, computer-access, capacity-building and content."

Charles Thorpe, Ph.D., Dean, Carnegie Mellon University in Qatar;
Faculty member and Former Director of the Robotics Institute
"The Future of Robotics"

Robotics technology is helping solve real-world practical problems, such as search and rescue in dangerous places, or control of complex mechanisms. It also is a platform for studying deep scientific problems of perception, motion and artificial intelligence. This talk will draw on the 25-year history of the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon to illustrate both practical and scientific challenges of robotics.

Pradeep Khosla, Ph.D., Dean of the Carnegie Institute of Technology; the Philip and Marsha Dowd Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Robotics; Co-founder and Co-director of Carnegie Mellon CyLab
"CyLab - A Multidisciplinary Initiative in Trustworthy and Secure Computing"

Advances in computer and communications technologies have formed the basis for global economic growth and an increase in our standard of living for more than two decades. We rely on information technology in all aspects of our daily life more than we ever have in the past, and this reliance will continue to grow. With this increased reliance comes the need to make information systems more secure, trustworthy, sustainable and available.

Mark Kamlet, Ph.D., Carnegie Mellon Provost

Kamlet will lead a discussion of the impact of information technology and computer science on education.

Kenneth R. Koedinger, Ph.D., Associate Professor, Human-Computer Interaction Institute, School of Computer Science
"The Pittsburgh Science of Learning Center"

Koedinger will discuss this center, funded by a $25 million grant from the National Science Foundation, which will sponsor rigorous research into how people learn and, based on what they find, develop technologies and approaches to teaching that will foster consistently high achievement in the classroom.

Joel Smith, Ph.D., Vice Provost and Chief Information Officer
"The Open Learning Initiative - Creating a New Paradigm for Online Education"

The Open Learning Initiative (OLI) is creating a new generation of online courses that teach more effectively and appeal to students more powerfully than anything in existence today. The project adds to online education the crucial elements of instructional design grounded in cognitive theory, formative evaluation for students and faculty and iterative course improvement based on empirical evidence.