How math majors can help your business Dr. Jonathan D Adler jadler.info

My background BS in Mathematical Sciences from Worcester Polytechnic Institute I always liked solving math problems Had productive summers Internship at BBN Raytheon Senior project doing research project for BOSE Wanted to be a math professor because I liked school MS in Applied Math from Worcester Polytechnic Institute “Having a masters will make me more marketable, I guess!” More experience along the way (internship at Boeing) Irrelevant master’s thesis: “Graph decompositions and monadic second order logic” Worked for a while at Vistaprint then Boeing PhD in Industrial Engineering from Arizona State University Worked at as a consultant for several companies Now work as a consultant at Promontory Growth and Innovation 2

Why math students can help If you’re a company in 2015 you probably Have lots of data sitting on servers Have a desire to have that data be analyzed and produce insights Want to be able to hire bright employees coming out of college Unfortunately Figuring out what you can really do with the data is hard Finding people who can take that data and use it is hard Figuring out which people would make good employees from a single set of interviews is hard Math students can help 3

The three partner relationship 4 Local businesses: Real world data and problems Math majors: The time and energy to investigate solutions to problems Lee University: The understanding to look at a business and determine how to help The university acts as a bridge between the business and the students How do you choose the problems to work on? How hard is it? Is it something math can help with? When is a solution “good?” Which students would be good for this?

Example problems In the next few slides I will show three example problems from my life that are great instances of what math students can do All three examples can be done by students at the undergraduate level All three examples are with businesses that aren’t known for their math problems 5

Example problem 1: targeted advertising A company sells brownies online to ship as gifts The company wants to send different marketing materials to businesses (gifts for clients) and consumers (gifts for family and friends) Customers fill out company name line in address, but not consistent How do you tell who is a business and who is a consumer? Use the words in the gift message "Happy birthday love mom" = Consumer Determine the probability that someone is a business given each word in their message, combine all the words to get the overall probabilities Naïve Bayes method with Laplace smoothing Were able to improve advertisement targeting by about 10% 6

Example problem 2: staffing optimization A hospital has hourly staff, which work in different departments and jobs (sometimes multiple) The staff is taking a lot of overtime hours How much of that overtime is necessary? A matching problem: The departments and jobs have a demand that needs to be filled and the staff has a supply There is a bipartite graph between those two sets, and the edges are if an employee can do that job A linear program can be solved to figure out how much of the demand can be served before needing overtime Ended up determining about $1 million a year was wasted in overtime 7 Departments/JobsEmployees

Example problem 3: quality control Problem: An ecommerce company had data on revenue for every order for the past few years On a recent Tuesday had a bug on the online store which went undetected and lowered sales dramatically A director ed me and asked for history of sales over all Tuesdays, was going to take the average of that and if you’re below it you can tell there is a bug Options: a)Run a SQL query to get the data and it to him b)Point out it’s a much more complicated and interesting problem Sales are increasing over time Only interested in sudden drops How do you correctly determine how low is “too low?” What if you want to detect it more quickly than that? 8

Example problem 3: quality control I was loud and complained we were doing things the wrong way, and ultimately was put in charge of a team to create a system of statistical quality control tools to detect anomalies Compare to recent few hours for sudden drops, previous week for more long term decay. Use mean and standard deviation to detect when an drop is sufficiently large We were able to determine if there was a problem in the site in hours instead of days 9

What’s in it for the business? When working with math students you get: Students and faculty who will help you look at your business in a new angle A potentially new solution to an existing problem you have A set of people who you may want to hire You may find that the students working with you are excellent hires (before other companies) Even if you don’t hire the students, you’re name will be within the community as a good company to work for Just because they are math majors doesn’t mean they have to get “math” jobs 10

Difference between “Math” and “mathy” 11 “mathy” work “Math” work Office work Proving theorems Developing new methods Finding new applications for existing methods Using existing methods in conventional ways Manipulating data in interesting ways Manipulating data in Excel Manipulating charts in PowerPoint Pressing the button that needs to be pressed Going to meetings Most people think of these as jobs for math students Undergrad math students can do these alone Undergrad math students working with faculty can do this

Everyone wins Having a relationship with Lee University math students is great for all parties: The businesses gets New solutions to existing problems Potential new hires Reputation in the academic community The students get Experience with working on real world problems Potentially a job The University gets Problems for their students and faculty Connections to local businesses A good way to attract future students 12

Questions? 13