DR. RAMNATH K. CHELLAPPA,PROFESSOR OF INFORMATION SYSTEMS &OPERATIONS MANAGEMENT;ASSOCIATE DEAN & ACADEMIC DIRECTOR,MS IN BUSINESS ANALYTICS.
AI, BUSINESS & EMORY
Amidst all the technological advances, businesses have been struggling to keep up. From Machine Learning to AI to now Large Language Models, the readiness of organizations to adopt these new techniques has varied. At one end you have firms like Google, Facebook and other digital natives while at the other, you have the traditional big box retailers and airlines with a vast amount of legacy data and technologies. Goizueta’s MSBA program was created to address these very challenges – designed to be at the intersection of business, data and technology, students learn advanced machine learning and AI techniques using cloud computing to solve business problem. The analytics practicum allows students to act as consultants where we work with a number of client firms to enable data-driven decision making in a variety of functional areas from supply chain to marketing to human resources. Students have come up with solutions that range from natural language processing techniques for predicting infection during surgery to explanatory models for pricing and customer acquisition/retention. We purposefully work with a wide range of industry sectors from healthcare to retail to airlines.
The impact of technological advances form the core of my research where I purposefully examine the unintended consequences of technology adoption on both business and society. While digitization of products was received with great gusto by one and all, along with it came piracy that had a huge impact on the revenue and pricing models of movies, music and games. Much of my work in this arena has focused on the evolving business models to manage this impact. Similarly consumers love personalization of services where a Google Maps is able to predict the least congested route for you but the flip side of this is the privacy concern regarding the collection and usage of this data. As individuals and society, much work needs to be done with regards to data ownership. Perhaps the greatest impact on our lives is going to come from the usage of Large Language Models and generative AI – while greatly useful to everyday life, elements of algorithmic fairness and copyright issues are far from figured out. Aspects of misinformation and deep fakes are already taking a toll on society warranting serious academic investigation!
Dr. Ramnath K. Chellappa is a Professor of Information Systems & Operations Management at the Goizueta Business School, Emory University. He is also the founding dean and academic director of the Master of Science in Business Analytics (MSBA). Previously, he served on the faculty of Marshall School of Business, University of Southern California. Prof. Chellappa is a recognized leader in the academic community and was previously the president of the INFORMS Information Systems Society.
Prof. Chellappa has won numerous awards for his research in the areas of economics of information privacy and digital piracy. His current research examines the business and societal implications of Artificial Intelligence. He has also been recognized for his teaching, including by the Provost’s Distinguished Teaching Award for Excellence in Graduate and Professional Education. He received his PhD from the McCombs School of Business at the University of Texas in Austin where his work provided the first scholarly definition of the term “Cloud Computing”.
