On November 21 at 4:30 PM in SAS 1102, there will be a seminar on academic hiring. Profs. Ilse Ipsen, Ralph Smith, and Mansoor Haider will discuss their experiences on hiring committees at NCSU, and will provide some insight into the dos and don’ts for appealing to departments for academic positions.

On November 11, at 5:45 in SAS 4102, Dr. Jordan Massad, a NCSU Applied Math alum, will be giving a seminar on his work at Sandia National Laboratory. Pizza will be served at 5:30 in the 4th floor lounge.

There will be a Mathematics in Industry seminar on Thursday, October 17 at 4PM. Mike Thompson, Managing Director and CEO of First Analytics on Centennial Campus, will talk about how they use mathematics and machine learning at their company to handle large scale data analytics problems.

The seminar is in Tompkins G109 at 4PM on Thursday, October 17.

The SIAM Student chapter and the Statistics department will be hosting a joint seminar by Kaska Adoteye, a data scientist from Microsoft and NC State alumni.

The seminar is at 4:30-5:30 PM in SAS 1216.

Abstract: How much is an idea really worth? What defines success for a product? How can we quantify “better” or “worse”? At Microsoft we have tens of thousands of engineers and data scientists trying to improve products that touch over a billion people worldwide. The data scale is enormous, and we’re trying to learn from that data daily. How can we do this effectively? The Internet provides developers of connected software, including web sites, applications, and devices, an unprecedented opportunity to accelerate innovation by evaluating ideas quickly and accurately using trustworthy controlled experiments (e.g., A/B tests and their generalizations). From front-end user-interface changes to backend recommendation systems and relevance algorithms, from search engines (e.g., Google, Microsoft’s Bing, Yahoo) to retailers (e.g., Amazon, eBay, Netflix, Etsy) to social networking services (e.g., Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter) to Travel services (e.g., Expedia, Airbnb, Booking.com) to many startups, online controlled experiments are now utilized to make data-driven decisions at a wide range of companies. While the theory of a controlled experiment is simple, and dates back to Sir Ronald A. Fisher’s experiments at the Rothamsted Agricultural Experimental Station in England in the 1920s, the deployment and mining of online controlled experiments at scale and deployment of online controlled experiments across dozens of web sites and applications has taught us many lessons. We provide an introduction, share real examples, key lessons, and cultural challenges.