Pioneering implementation of analytics to business decision making: contributions to domain knowledge conceptualization, research design, methodology development, data modeling and statistical data analysis: Aviva Lev-Ari, UCB, PhD’83; HUJI, MA’76
Author: Aviva Lev-Ari, PhD, RN
May 24, 2018
April 12. 2017
INTRODUCTION
In 1975, while a Masters student at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem (HUJI), I attended a graduate course, “Methodology Development and Theory Construction in the Social Sciences”. The course was taught by Prof. Louis Guttman. He arrived in Israel in 1948 from Cornell University to establish the measurement concentration in cognitive sciences in the psychology department at HUJI. He established the Applied Research Institute in Social Sciences, where public opinion studies were carried out for fifty years. Dr. Shlomit Levy, a key collaborator of Prof. Guttman, was the teaching assistant for the class. Every Masters student across all the departments of the social sciences faculty, planning to write a Master thesis enrolled in this course, one semester for five hours a week.
It had two major project submissions and two exams. It was considered the most difficult course at HUJI. I got [A minus] and was stimulated and attracted to the course domain for the 25 years that followed.
Following this course, I attended an advanced course by Professor Chaim Adler:
http://taubcenter.org.il/chaim-adler/,
in the Department of Sociology on multivariate analysis, and have used ADDTREE, a software developed by Prof. Amos Tversky and his programmer, a PhD student in the mathematics department at HUJI, Shmuel Sattath, who assisted me with SPSS on my Master thesis data base, which had 200 subjects and 42 variables and was considered a large data set for SPSS in 1975. Mr. Sattath recommended ADDTREE. The programming functions were taken over by Amnon Antebi, who worked with me on MSA, POSA, and ADDTREE, carrying two heavy boxes of computer punched cards for the CDC mainframe computer at the Center for Computation at HUJI. Antebi, as a professional mainframe computer programmer, alone could submit jobs and pick up the printed output, which was placed in bins alphabetically by the last name of the programmer.
Professor Louis Guttman was the developer of the Guttman scale, MDS: MSA, SSA, and POSA, and many other algorithms used originally in psychometrics since 1880. The field is concerned with the objective measurement of skills and knowledge, abilities, attitudes, personality traits, and educational achievement. Assessment tools such as questionnaires, tests, raters’ judgments, and personality tests were constructed and adopted, and these became the foundation of quantitative modeling in the social sciences since the 1930s.
Guttman was a member of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities, a foreign honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and president of the Psychometric Society. In 1956 he was a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences; in 1962 he received the Rothschild Prize. The development of scaling theory by Louis Guttman and Clyde Coombs has been recognized by Science as one of 62 major advances in the social sciences in the period 1900-1965.[1] Other awards were:
Guttman died on October 25, 1987, while on sabbatical leave in Minneapolis.
https://wikivividly.com/wiki/Louis_Guttman
In this course I learned MDS: MSA, SSA, POSA and to design questionnaires. I designed one for my Masters thesis and applied it to two samples with 100 heads of household in each sample. I applied the Kolmogorov-Smirnov test for a two-sample comparison and applied the ADDTREE clustering algorithm to compare the results of dimensionality reduction of 42 variables by MDS vs ADDTREE, This was the first application of
- ADDTREE software to consumer preferences
- MDS to consumer choice under constraints
The thesis grade contributed to the final Master GPA. I was told by the graduate office that my GPA was the highest grade ever awarded for a Masters degree in social sciences at HUJI until 1976.
Of all the courses I took at HUJI during the six years of my enrollment for a BA and an MA – it was Prof. Guttman and Prof. Adler’s courses that set off my career in quantitative methods from the start of the Masters thesis for the next 25 years, performing creative data modeling and analysis as a profession.
While working at SRI, I contacted Yissum, the HUJI’s technology transfer office (TTO) for licensing the MDS software, written by Reuven Amar, at SRI International. We applied MSA and SSA on GM data and in several other studies. This was the second time that I licensed the software from HUJI.
I cherish the correspondence I had with Prof. Louis Guttman following my hiring at SRI International. He was very proud to know that his student was using MSA for General Motors management decision making on selective divestiture of their auto parts division. He knew SRI International, as an R&D institution, very well for its projects in education, biostatistics and genetics (his wife, Prof. Ruth Guttman, was professor of Genetics at Cornell and HUJI.)
I visited him in 1986 in Jerusalem, showing him the computer output of the data from the GM project. Of course, he had important insights into the interpretation of the results. I sent him a copy of a professional movie made on the GM model that I designed. The VCR cassette was returned to me by his daughter in New Jersey following his death, 10/25/1987. He received it at the hospital. He knew about it but was unable to watch the movie, I was told.
The first time I licensed the MDS software from Yissum, was for teaching purposes at UC Berkeley, 1979, 1980, and 1981.
Upon my admission to the PhD Program at UC Berkeley, Prof. Pred arranged for me a teaching assistantship for an upper division course, three semesters in Quantitative Methods. This was the last course before graduation for any concentration in Letters & Sciences. The course was attended by students from geography, political sciences, political economics, economics, archeology, city planning, and botany. Any student that wished to learn about multivariate classification and prediction modeling enrolled.
It was a great privilege to write recommendation letters in February for a student graduating in May 1982. Some told me that “this is the only course that will get me a job.” It turned out that, that was true for myself as well, referring to Prof. Guttman’s course. Following the graduation from the Masters program at HUJI, I was hired at the Technion, IIT, because I mastered non-linear modeling and in particular MDS: MSA, SSA, and POSA.
During my career, I had the opportunity to design numerous one-of-a-kind models which represent pioneering implementations of analytics. A complete list is documented in the sources, below (List of Publications, 1983-2004). The very salient ones that represent milestones in the profession and the first application of these algorithms in these specific domain knowledge, include the following selective list:
- Application of Multidimensional Scaling (MDS) for decomposition of consumer multivariate preference function, Master thesis, HUJI, 1976
- Application of Multidimensional Scaling (MDS) for classification of urban municipalities in Israel for resource allocation of Ministry of Transportation road safety budget, Technion, TRC, RSC, 1977-1978
- Multivariate analysis of product portfolios across 27 leading American paper companies for industrial concentration assessment and corporate benchmarking in sector context. PhD dissertation, UC Berkeley, 1983.
- Application of Multidimensional Scaling (MDS) for SRI International’s clients: Competitive Assessment: Automotive. That contribution is mentioned in the 1987 Annual Report. Technology Assessment: Chemical and Allied Products, Resource Allocation Modeling in Advanced Material, Credit Scoring problem for clients in the Financial Sectors: Banking & Insurance
- Demand Forecasting Model for Hardware, Amdahl Corporation. This model led to 1989 Employee Award.
- Design of a Digital Market Place for Analytical Services at Concept Five Technologies, Inc.1996.
- Design of Analytics suite of services for Digital Marketplaces: lumber, hospital supplies, MRO and consumables, PSC, 2007-2001. This modeling effort led to a distinguish bonus award,1999.
- Adaptive Testing at McGraw-Hill, 2002, application of inverted simulation annealing algorithm for prediction of maximum functions in achievement scores.
HIGHLIGHTS
APPOINTMENTS – Director level, Advanced Analytics
In 25 years of working in corporate America for companies that are #1 in their sector, I received and accepted eleven job offers!
Chiefly,
- SRI International, Menlo Park, CA – Largest THINK TANK in the US
Title: Director Business & Economic Statistics
- Amdahl Corporation, Sunnyvale, CA – 3rd largest mainframe computer company in the world, acquired by Fujitzu
Title: Manager, Demand Forecasting and Modeling
- Monitor Group, Cambridge, MA – Top Tier Management Consulting, acquired by Deloitte
Title: Senior Methodology Consultant, Financial Sector
- MITRE, Bedford, MA – largest federally funded R&D corporation and its spin-offs:
Title at MITRE: Head of Research, Economic & Decision Analysis Center
Title at MITRETEK: Director of Analytics
Title at Concept Five Technologies, Inc.: Director, Advanced Information Systems
- Perot Systems Corporation, Cambridge, MA – Top IT outsourcer, acquired by Dell Computers
Title: Director, Advanced Analytics Digital Marketplaces
- McGraw-Hill/CTB, Monterey, CA – world’s oldest publisher
Title: Director of Research: Methods and Applications
BUILDING PROFESSIONAL EXPERTISE IN APPLICATION of QUANTITATIVE METHODS FOR CORPORATE DECISION MAKING BASED OF DATA SCIENCE
A Twenty Five year Career in Data Science
Data Science is the Greatest Science! It is the Greatest Science for Women, as well
https://pharmaceuticalintelligence.com/2018/03/12/data-science-is-the-greatest-science-it-is-the-greatest-science-for-women-as-well/
Professional Self Re-Invention: From Academia to Industry – Opportunities for PhDs in the Business Sector of the Economy
https://pharmaceuticalintelligence.com/2018/05/22/professional-self-re-invention-from-academia-to-industry-opportunities-for-phds-in-the-business-sector-of-the-economy/
In a 5/22/2018 article, Ways to Pursue Science Careers in Business After a PhD By ankita gurao,
https://bitesizebio.com/38498/ways-to-pursue-the-business-of-science-after-a-ph-d/?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=SocialWarfare
Unemployment figures of PhDs by field of science are included, Ankita Gurao identifies the following four alternative careers for PhDs in the non-academic world:
A. Science Writer/Journalist/Communicator
B. Science Management
C. Science Administration
D. Science Entrepreneurship
My career, as presented in Reflections on a Four-phase Career: Aviva Lev-Ari, PhD, RN, March 2018
https://pharmaceuticalintelligence.com/2018/03/06/reflections-on-a-four-phase-career-aviva-lev-ari-phd-rn-march-2018/
has the following phases:
- Phase 1: Research, 1973 – 1983
- Phase 2: Corporate Applied Research in the US, 1985 – 2005
- Phase 3: Career Reinvention in Health Care, 2005 – 2012
- Phase 4: Electronic Scientific Publishing, 4/2012 to Present
These four phases are easily mapped to the four alternative careers for PhDs in the non-academic world. One can draw parallels between the four career opportunities A,B,C,D, above, and each one of the four phases in my own career.
Namely, I have identified A,B,C,D as early as 1985, and pursued each of them in several institutional settings, as follows:
A. Science Writer/Journalist/Communicator – see link above for Phase 4: Electronic Scientific Publishing, 4/2012 to Present
B. Science Management – see link above for Phase 2: Corporate Applied Research in the US, 1985 – 2005 and Phase 3: Career Reinvention in Health Care, 2005 – 2012
C. Science Administration – see link above for Phase 2: Corporate Applied Research in the US, 1985 – 2005 and Phase 4: Electronic Scientific Publishing, 4/2012 to Present
D. Science Entrepreneurship – see link above for Phase 4: Electronic Scientific Publishing, 4/2012 to Present
SOURCES
List of Publications, 1983 – 2004
https://pharmaceuticalintelligence.com/founder/list-of-publications-1983-2004/
List of Invited Lectures, 1983 -2004
https://pharmaceuticalintelligence.com/founder/list-of-invited-lectures-1983-2004/
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