Ramayya Krishnan, Dean of Heinz College, Carnegie Mellon University

With Big Data, what was previously invisible is now visible. That has enormous potential. At the same time, it raises important questions about individual privacy. Ramayya Krishnan explores this balance. 

EXPERIMENTS IN DATA ANALYSIS: THE CASE OF THE TAXIS AND DRIVER BEHAVIOR

The proliferation of data about individual behavior from sources such as social media, mobile devices and location-based services has been well documented. These data permit careful analysis and modeling of individual behaviors at a level of granularity that hithertofore was infeasible. In this talk, Dr. Krishnan will discuss ongoing work with colleagues using a unique data set from over 12,000 taxis operating in a large Asian country. The data set compiles longitudinal GPS trace data from the taxis which is a record of decision making by the drivers, compiles network relationships that arise between the drivers and logs the income earned by the drivers. Using a number of disciplinary approaches, the work examines the decision making behaviors and information models used by the drivers, individually and as members of a networked organization. The talk will provide an overview of recent results and ongoing research.

Ramayya Krishnan is the Dean of Heinz College at Carnegie Mellon University. He holds the John Heinz III Deanship and is the W. W. Cooper and Ruth F. Cooper Professor of Management Science and Information Systems at Carnegie Mellon University. He has a B. Tech in Mechanical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras, a M.S. in Industrial Engineering and Operations Research and a PhD in Management Science and Information Systems from the University of Texas at Austin. He is an International Research Fellow of the International Center for Electronic Commerce in Korea and a Visiting Scientist at the Institute for Information Systems at Humboldt University (Germany). He was a founding faculty member of the Information Systems Management program.

His current research projects investigate risk management in business process design and in information security, social network analysis in settings ranging from call data records to knowledge sharing communities, consumer behavior in e-business settings and the design of policies that take into account the competing needs of promoting data access and protecting privacy. He has published widely on these topics.