A groundbreaking study from Maryland Smith’s Center for Health Information and Decisions Systems is the first to examine how reciprocity could be used as a motivator to influence behaviors.

Maryland Smith’s Gah-Yi Ban won the 2021 Best Operations Management paper in Operations Research from the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS), an international society for practitioners in the fields of operations research, management science and analytics.

Maryland Smith’s Wedad Elmaghraby, professor of operations management and management science, was awarded the Distinguished Service Award for 2021 by the Manufacturing and Service Operations Management (MSOM) society.

In the 1980s, Atari ruled the video game universe. Game developers flocked to the pioneering platform, churning out new titles. But most games developed for Atari were not Pac-Man-level quality, and that ultimately led to the platform’s demise. New research from Maryland Smith pinpoints the best strategies for today’s platforms to curate lots of high-quality content and avoid Atari’s fate.

Industry Experts Help Coach, Evaluate Maryland Smith Students Through 2-Week Analytics Competition A team of Maryland Smith undergraduates from an "Introduction to Optimization" class earned first place in the annual Datathon organized by the Smith Analytics Consortium (SAC) with support from Deloitte. The competition, which concluded on April 30, 2021, was virtual and consisted of 12 student teams representing undergraduate, MBA, and MS (marketing analytics and information systems) programs.

During TechFest 2021, undergraduate students from the University of Maryland’s Robert H. Smith School of Business took home top honors in the KPMG Excel Competition. Hosted by the Department of Decision, Operations and Information Technologies, the competition was open to all UMD students. 

At Maryland Smith’s annual TechFest, speaker Jesse Hwang opened his presentation with a warning. “The COVID-19 crisis has forced banks and their customers to use digital tools and processes to compensate for branch, office and call center closures,” said Hwang,  a senior manager of cyber technical at Capital One. “This embarking on a cloud and digital transformation journey makes banks lucrative targets for cyber-criminals, who treated the pandemic as a once-in-a-lifetime gold rush.”

New research from Maryland Smith’s Margrét Bjarnadóttir that asks how organizations can leverage AI to build a more equitable workforce has been named the Best White Paper in the 2021 Wharton Analytics Conference.

Maryland Smith’s Department of Decision, Operations & Information Technologies is getting ready for TechFest. The annual forum brings together industry leaders who are at the forefront of addressing cybersecurity and privacy issues using modern tools. This year’s industry speakers will include Jesse Hwang, a senior manager of cyber technical in the financial sector, and Lahar Mishra, MS ’19, a technical risk management analyst at Verizon Media.