Innovating with intelligence: Sharda helping Spears Business elevate AI education, research

Innovating with intelligence: Sharda helping Spears Business elevate AI education, research

Friday, November 1, 2024

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Dr. Ramesh Sharda arrived on the Oklahoma State University campus as an assistant professor in the fall of 1980, and it did not take long for the budding data scientist to start teaching the value of artificial intelligence to his students.

Over four decades later, AI is once again at the forefront of business education, and Sharda is now the vice dean for graduate programs and research, as well as a Regents Professor of Management Science and Information Systems at the Spears School of Business.

In this role, Sharda helps shape the college's approach to AI research and curriculum, so Discover@Spears magazine sat down with him to find out how Spears Business is approaching this central topic.

Discover: AI has created a seismic shift in the way business is conducted. Spears Business has been ahead of that curve, particularly in terms of AI-related research and classroom implementation. To what do you attribute the college's success in this area?

Sharda: We have been a leader in teaching and research in the analytics space for a long time. For example, we were one of the earliest business school programs in data mining (an earlier version of analytics/AI), producing the largest number of graduates with SAS Data Mining certificates. Students in our business analytics/data science program, led by Dr. Goutam Chakraborty, have been winning national and international competitions for years. We also have faculty who are leading coauthors of a popular business school textbook on analytics/AI. All of this is possible due to an excellent faculty team. This also translates to a strong research group with a focus on analytics business applications in general and health analytics in particular.

I also attribute our success to a culture of more hands-on approach to technology instruction and research, rather than just studying impacts or acceptance of what other people are creating.

Discover: Are there any pioneering projects or breakthroughs in AI research from the Spears School of Business that you're most proud of?

Sharda: We have had faculty members earn a patent for developing an index to evaluate the risk of diagnostic retinopathy. Some members of our Center for Health Systems Innovation and faculty from industrial engineering were the coinventors of this patent. Another faculty member, Dr. Rathindra Sarathy, earned a patent some years ago for masking data that is shared between organizations for various purposes.

A project that I was personally involved in related to being able to predict how well a movie would do at the box office. I worked on it for a few years and then invited Dr. Dursun Delen to participate when he joined OSU. We achieved some really good results and were able to get some media coverage for OSU for this work. More recently, a number of projects in health analytics/AI have been our main successes, leading to the creation of a Center for Predictive Medicine as a joint collaboration of the Department of Management Science and Information Systems and the Center for Health Systems Innovation. Already, a new faculty member within MSIS, Dr. Xiao Luo, has been awarded NIH grants. Delen, a CHSI/MSIS faculty member, also has a large grant from the U.S. Army. He is also the co-editor of a new journal in business analytics. We also have a number of other faculty members exploring various applications of AI in business. So, this area is certainly one of the leading areas of academic focus in Spears Business.

Discover: What is your vision for the role of AI in the future of business education and research at Spears Business?

Sharda: We want to be known as a top school in business AI research and teaching. To this end, we want to encourage innovative AI applications in teaching and learning. Not just worry about the academic integrity concerns from students using the technology, but how can we enhance their learning experiences by integrating these technologies in our classes. To this end, this issue of our Discover magazine highlights many experiments underway by faculty colleagues in areas as diverse as accounting to business communication to human resource management.

We also want to keep building our research prominence in developing impactful AI applications in diverse areas, including health, finance, hospitality management, marketing and others. This dimension includes initiatives to support seed research to make our faculty colleagues' research proposals more competitive with funding agencies, as well as incentives to have faculty members publish more top-tier journal articles.

Discover: Spears Business faculty are working with our partners at the OSU Center for Health Sciences by developing AI programs to dive inside large data sets to find meaningful health care solutions. Not only does that align with OSU's land-grant mission but it also has the potential to change the lives of everyday Oklahomans, doesn't it?

Sharda: Yes, indeed. Many of the examples of health analytics applications I have mentioned earlier were possible because of this unique access to a large trove of patients' data that is HIPAA compliant but gives us enough info to be able to tease out signatures of specific diseases for enabling early projections. Such work indeed has the potential to make a significant impact on the general health of not just Oklahomans but beyond our borders as well.

Discover: What has the reception been like from Spears Business' industry partners to the college's innovative approach to AI implementation?

Sharda: I categorize the response as extremely enthusiastic. Our graduates of the Master's in Business Analytics and Data Science program are being placed in top companies all around the U.S. This is true even for many graduates who need to receive employer sponsorships for visa purposes. This is an indication of the quality of our graduates. We also have several companies sponsor and fund industry projects for exploring AI applications in their world.

Discover: You and Dr. James Payne, dean of Spears Business, put an emphasis on faculty seeking research grants. Can you tell us about your plan to grow in this area?

Sharda: We have launched a seed grant program to help faculty members do more preparatory work to be able to win major grants for industry and government. This year, seven such seed grants were awarded to faculty members from across Spears Business. We also provide several incentives for faculty to pursue funded research. We are currently hiring a sponsored research program specialist to help faculty members with the paperwork associated with proposals and awards.

Photo by: Adam Luther
Story by: Stephen Howard | Discover@Spears Magazine

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