Sudha Ram is an Indian-American business professor. She holds the Anheuser-Busch Chair in MIS, Entrepreneurship and Innovation at the
University of Arizona's
Eller College of Management
The Eller College of Management (Eller) is a business school at the University of Arizona located in Tucson, Arizona. The Eller College of Management began in 1913 as bachelor's degree program in commerce before becoming the University of Arizona ...
and directs the INSITE: Center for Business Intelligence and Analytics.
Early life and education
Ram completed her
Bachelor of Science degree in Chemistry from the
University of Madras and received her MBA from the
Indian Institute of Management Calcutta. Following this, she travelled to North American and enrolled in the
University of Illinois for her PhD.
Ram completed her PhD under the guidance of her doctoral advisor, computer scientist
Geneva Belford.
Career
Upon completing her PhD in 1985, Ram joined the faculty at the
University of Arizona's
Eller College of Management
The Eller College of Management (Eller) is a business school at the University of Arizona located in Tucson, Arizona. The Eller College of Management began in 1913 as bachelor's degree program in commerce before becoming the University of Arizona ...
. She was a founding board member of the
Maha Ganapati Temple of Arizona and taught
Hindi at the Krishna Temple in Phoenix.
In 2011, Ram established the INSITE: Center for Business Intelligence and Analytics to "develop techniques, algorithms, and technologies to extract actionable insights from "Big Data" including structured and unstructured sources such as blogs, tweets, and other sources." As the director, she partnered with
Fortaleza
Fortaleza (, locally , Portuguese for ''Fortress'') is the state capital of CearĂ¡, located in Northeastern Brazil. It belongs to the Metropolitan mesoregion of Fortaleza and microregion of Fortaleza. It is Brazil's 5th largest city and the t ...
officials and the University of Fortaleza to solve their overcrowded transportation issues. Ram and her colleagues helped develop an online dashboard where Fortaleza city planners could access data about possible issues within the city's bus system. She also worked with researchers in the United States and led the creation of a model that was able to successfully predict approximately how many asthma-related incidents would plague a Dallas emergency room. Her research teams' model came to this conclusion based on an analysis of data gleaned from electronic medical records, air quality sensors and Twitter. Through the period of three months, Ram and her research team collected air quality data from environmental sensors and gathered and analyzed asthma-related tweets containing certain keywords. Once the data was collected, the model used text-mining techniques to figure out the ZIP codes where most of the hospital's patients live, according to electronic medical records.
As a result of her research endeavours, Ram was named the co-recipient of the Anheuser-Busch Chair in Entrepreneurship Studies alongside finance professor
Sandy Klasa
Sandy may refer to:
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*Sandy (singer), Brazilian singer and actress Sandy Leah Lima (born 1983)
*(Sandy) A ...
. In an effort to increase student retention at the university, Ram worked with Arizona's IT department to gather data on freshman ID cards (called CatCard) usage over a three-year period. By tracking their digital traces, she was able to correctly identify 85% of students who would drop out before they graduated. Ram then generated a list of the top 20% at high risk of dropping out and sent them out to the individual college advisers. However, this raised privacy concerns and was compared to China's
Social Credit System. The following year, Ram was elected Editor in Chief of the ''Journal of Business Analytics'' ran through the
Operational Research Society.
During the
COVID-19 pandemic, Ram investigated ways to use information systems to help trace the spread of the virus for students, staff and faculty at the university. She led various projects including working on a Bluetooth-enabled app that would digitally trace contact that users have had with people around campus. Another one of her projects involved a web-based system using anonymized Wi-Fi logs to understand real-time movement and traffic patterns on campus.
References
External links
{{DEFAULTSORT:Ram, Sudha
Living people
1959 births
American academics of Indian descent
University of Arizona faculty
University of Madras alumni
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign alumni
Indian Institute of Management Calcutta