Wharton Customer Analytics and AI for Business merge

ANNALISA FANG Staff Reporter

analytics provided by Wharton Customer Analytics. AIAB’s overall mission is to expand how AI and analytics are used, specifically in business and society, Executive Director Mary Purk said in the announcement.

Underlying that mission is a series of goals.

AIAB's academic aim is to understand and further study how humans can collaborate with AI, and it will be guided by four research pillars: AI for Management, AI for Ethics and Governance, AI for Business Applications, and AI for Entrepreneurship.

Another goal is to help companies solve a variety of problems using whatever tool is required — whether it is AI, analytics, or both, AIAB Director of Research and Education Brandon Krakowsky said.

“We’re really acknowledging that AI is becoming a more common solution to the business problems that a lot of companies are having,” Krakowsky said.

Purk added that AI lets businesses solve "big impact" problems through a creative lens.

To prepare students to become the leaders of these businesses, Krakowsky said that AIAB will make sure they have the AI and analytics tools that they need to succeed. He cited how the projects that students work on have quickly become more multifaceted in recent years. As a result, a variety of methods are required in order to solve them, usually involving a combination of both analytics and AI.

hand in hand, we thought we would better serve our students and industry by marrying these two centers and expanding to provide more offerings to both our students and faculty,” AIAB Director of Operations and Student Engagement Matt Gray said.

Prior to the merger, AI for Business supported students with research, experience, and training to investigate AI applications. Wharton Customer Analytics was focused on applying analytics-based solutions to business problems, in order to connect the industry with academia.

AIAB brings under one roof the AI courses and academic research provided by AI for Business with the datasets and student programming in corporate love my team winning,” College sophomore Kendall Allen said. “I knew that I had no business running to Broad Street [when] the Chiefs won.”

Gray added that AIAB will work to ensure that students have access to all the latest information on what is happening in the world of AI. To educate students, AIAB will provide workshops, online modules, experiential learning, and more.

“We’re going to really focus on making sure that we’re training students to understand how artificial intelligence is going to change and influence the way businesses operate,” Gray said.

AIAB also features a Corporate Partnership Program, in which companies can work with the research institute to solve business problems. AIAB’s corporate partner list includes Fox Entertainment, IKEA, Lowe’s, McDonald’s, Microsoft Corporation, Nielsen Holdings, Petco, and Zillow.

On Feb. 3, AIAB co-sponsored the 2023 Women in Data Science Conference to celebrate diversity within the field of data science.

But for those from Philadelphia, or who had grown up Eagles fans, Sunday’s emotions were familiar. This was the third Philadelphia sports team to fall in the championship round in the last six months, with the Philadelphia Union and Phillies both coming up short on Nov. 5, 2022.

“This game means everything to me,” College first year Krystof Purtell said. “This day is more important than the birth of my first-born child … my Eagles fandom has always made me feel like a true Philadelphian.”

For international students, or those who had only started following the Eagles when they came to Penn, being able to experience Sunday’s roller coaster of emotions was still a remarkable experience.

“As a French person, I don’t really understand the rules, but I love the atmosphere,” graduate student Sandrine Rajaonarivony said. “Everybody is happy, sharing food, screaming, and it is just a good bonding moment.”

The most noticeable element in the crowd was a profound sense of disappointment. The team has decisions to make this offseason, and the Eagles won’t play for nearly seven more months. But amidst the anger and chaos, there were glimpses of hope.

“The city of Philadelphia is always gonna stick together, through good times and bad,” Engineering first year Josh Weissman said.

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Owerko said that the lack of compensation draws ESE graduate students to summer internships and other opportunities that offer more lucrative pay. Last summer, he worked for Apple and made more per week than he makes in a month at Penn.

“Towards the end of your Ph.D., you’re close to 30 [years old] and are ready to make big steps in life,” the student said. “Many of us want to do things like get married, but the Ph.D. stipend can restrict us from being able to do so.”

Several other universities across the country have implemented an increase in compensation for graduate students following the national intensification of graduate student unions and demands.

“We are passionate about what we do and we do not expect our experiences as Ph.D. students to be easy,” the letter from the Penn doctoral students said. “However, we hope you agree that living at or below the minimum standard of living is unacceptable for an institution such as Penn.” new option for social science students, Diebold said. The courses were created as calculus classes that de-emphasize physical applications of calculus in favor of more theoretical applications, as well as microeconomics and game theory.

While the new courses are primarily oriented towards economics majors — the only social science major to require multivariate calculus at Penn — students in other disciplines may take the course. For instance, Wharton students may use MATH 1070 to fulfill their math general education requirement, applying calculus to financial predictions and modeling.

The primary concepts between MATH 1070 and MATH 1400, as well as MATH 1080 and MATH 1410, will remain the same, allowing students to alternate between the two tracks and prepare for further mathematical study. MATH 1070 was taught by mathematics professor Andrew Cooper last fall, and mathematics professor Henry Towsner is teaching MATH 1080 this spring, according to Penn Course Review.

Diebold said that topics such as geometric integrals, advanced integration techniques, and vector calculus — which are heavily emphasized in MATH 1400 and MATH 1410 — are often of little to no use to social science students. In the new curriculum, these topics are de-emphasized in favor of more abstract concepts like estimation, growth rates, and optimization, he said.

“The reason you have to take multivariable

DATA , from page 6 calculus [in economics] is optimization; it’s not emphasized in 1410,” College first year Johnathan Mosenco, an economics major currently taking MATH 1080, said.

Despite Gen Z’s higher familiarity with the internet, Turow said they still have misunderstandings regarding the pervasiveness of data surveillance.

“When students come to Penn, they have almost no understanding of what happens behind the screen," Turow told the DP.

Under current Federal Trade Commission guidelines, “commercial surveillance” only requires users’ “notice and consent.” Though companies must make their practices apparent, they often present consent forms in ways that are difficult to recognize or read, according to The New York Times.

The study highlighted the shortcomings of the “notice and consent” requirement because explicit consent requires people to understand the full implications of commercial data extraction.

"Genuine opt-out and opt-in consent requires that people have knowledge about commercial data-extraction practices as well as a belief they can do something about them. … Americans have neither," the report said.

“[MATH 1070 and MATH 1080 are] immensely important to students because it’s much more closely tailored to the things that economists and most social scientists need,” Diebold said.

Diebold said that 1070 and 1080 are “self-contained,” meaning students entering the sequence are not assumed to have any previous calculus knowledge. He added that after taking these courses, students will be well-prepared for higherlevel math classes, such as MATH 2400, should they choose to advance.

Currently, the new courses are in their pilot year with MATH 1070 being first offered in the fall of 2022, and MATH 1080 being first offered this spring. Penn will officially offer both courses in the fall of 2023, after which it plans to offer both courses each semester. That said, the Math Department expects most people will prefer to enroll in MATH 1070 in the fall and MATH 1080 in the spring, Undergraduate Chair Philip Gressman said.

Students that the DP spoke with said that they were curious to try the new courses as alternatives to the previous calculus sequence, and they have had a positive experience so far. College sophomore Silas Ruth, an economics major currently taking MATH 1080, said that the reputation of 1400 and 1410 encouraged him to try the new sequence.

“I had heard pretty negative things about MATH 1410,” Ruth said, “so I was interested in trying something new.”

Ruth, who previously took MATH 1400, also said that the courses had different structures. Whereas he found that lectures in MATH 1400 were very poorly attended, he said that the grouporiented approach in MATH 1080 encourages participation and attendance.

Mosenco agreed, adding that his class has 30 students, who “sit at smaller tables and get to do the problems together.”

Ruth said that lectures in MATH 1400 were not “in sync” with the concepts being taught in the videos, but MATH 1080’s use of a textbook and pre-class exercises reinforces the material taught in lecture.

“If you’re an [economics] major and want to develop a high-level multivariable calculus skillset, I would definitely highly recommend [MATH 1070 and MATH 1080],” Ruth said.