Professor to tackle business decision making in CyberScience Seminar series

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — In a day-to-day, decision-based world, is it wiser to give people recommendations or give them the knowledge to make the decisions themselves?

Chris Parker, an assistant professor of supply chain management in the Smeal College of Business and Institute for CyberScience associate, will present about this topic as part of the ICS CyberScience Seminar series. The event takes place 1:30 to 3 p.m. on Nov. 7 in 129A HUB-Robeson Center. It is free and open to the public. Seating is limited, so attendees must register in advance. It will also be streamed live via Zoom.

Titled “Show or Tell: Decision-Making in the Business World,” Parker’s talk will explore the use of high-performance computing for business based off his decision-making research done in a partnership with a Tanzanian mobile money operator, a system used in developing countries that gives people from these regions the ability to deposit, transfer and withdraw money from their phones.

The research uses data from an experiment involving more than 4,700 individuals who operate this system as bankers.  After observing these agents during a ten-month span, researchers used the data to examine how different types of training and instructions affected the day-to-day inventory of the mobile money businesses.

Covering a wide range of topics, the ICS CyberScience Seminar series is designed to showcase how data-intensive cyberscience and computational models address real-world scientific and social problems.