[Colloq] Colloquium Spkr - Today @ 1 PM

[Ravi Sundaram]

* * * * *

*College** of **Computer** and Information Science Colloquium*

Presents:

*Dr. Rama Ramakrishnan, Ph.D.*

*Chief Scientist, Oracle Retail & V.P, Analytics *

Who will speak on:

*Math and the Merchant: The Application of Econometrics, Machine
Learning and Optimization Technologies to Retail Decision-Making*

* *

*/Today, /**/December 14th, 2005/**//*

*/1:00 PM/*

*/366 West Village H/*

*/Northeastern University/*

/ /

_Abstract_:

Retailing is a global, multi-trillion dollar industry and touches just
about every person on the planet. Yet, despite its size and complexity,
most retail decisions are made primarily on instinct. This has started
to change in the last decade with the availability of granular and
timely sales data coupled with the development of sophisticated
decision-support software that analyzes this data and recommends optimal
decisions. Retailers are rapidly adopting this technology to help
improve the financial consequences of the numerous decisions they make
every day. In this talk, we focus on decisions made by retailers in the
merchandising process, perhaps the most important business process
within retail. We identify some of the core analytical decision problems
in this area and describe the algorithmic/modeling techniques that have
been developed to address these problems. We highlight the
inter-disciplinary nature of winning approaches i.e., they tend to be
hybrids that draw on ideas from disciplines such as econometrics,
machine learning and optimization. We conclude with a summary of the
financial impact of these techniques on retailers financials (and stock
prices!) worldwide.

_Bio_:

Rama is responsible for developing analytic techniques that have a
significant impact on retailers' businesses and incorporating them into
Oracles products and services. Prior to Oracle, Rama played a similar
role at retail profit optimization software firm ProfitLogic.
ProfitLogic was acquired by Oracle in July 2005.

Prior to joining ProfitLogic, Rama was the founder and principal of
Profit Sciences, an analytics consulting firm, where he advised clients
on the design of optimization algorithms to solve complex resource
allocation problems. Before that, Rama was co-founder and vice president
of product development at Redwood Investment Systems, a software company
that built one of the first web/wireless portfolio management systems
for quantitative investment managers.


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