The Interdisciplinary Decision Science & Analytics Lab (IDeAL) was inaugurated by Professor V. Nagadevara, former Dean and Director (i/c) of IIM Bangalore and Chair of the Faculty Development & Evaluation Committee of IIM Visakhapatnam, virtually here on Wednesday.
IDeAL is a centre of excellence dedicated to inter-disciplinary research.
Speaking to reporters, IIM-V Director Prof. M. Chandrasekhar said that IDeAL would play a vital role in bringing industry, government, and academia together to address socioeconomic issues of an interdisciplinary nature, particularly being faced by aspirational districts like Visakhapatnam.
Prof. Chandrasekhar elaborated that the aim of IDeAL is to act as a platform for conceptualizing, inventing, building, and valorising product and service innovations. He said IDeAL will focus, on health care and natural resource management solutions with a view to facilitating their availability, accessibility, and affordability.
Dr. Jai Ganesh, senior vice-president & head of Mphasis Research and Innovation Centre (NEXT Labs), spoke about the interplay of data sciences, artificial intelligence, and machine learning in the transformation of industry and society at large.
Prof. Parthasarathy Ramachandran, chairman, Department of Management Studies, Indian Institute of Science, in his address, spoke about current research challenges in inter-disciplinary sciences, such as collection, compilation, collation of big data; engagement and communicating with stakeholders, as well as the need for ensuring equity, equality and ethics in the use and interpretation of data.
Prof. Nagadevara in his inaugural address highlighted the need of inter-disciplinary how even areas like Organization Behaviour could benefit immensely from analytics. He stressed that the pandemic situation has the silver lining of being a good ground for developing descriptive, diagnostic, predictive and prescriptive analytics in the healthcare space.
Dr. Shivshanker Singh Patel, head of IDeAL at IIM, spoke.
