IIM-Vizag inaugurates a new Interdisciplinary Decision Science & Analytics Lab

IIM-Vizag welcomed a new Interdisciplinary Decision Science & Analytics Lab (IDeAL) facility at the campus. Professor V Nagadevara, former Dean and Director of IIM Bangalore, and Chair of the Faculty Development & Evaluation Committee of IIM Visakhapatnam inaugurated the facility on 18 August 2021.

IDeAL is a Centre of Excellence dedicated to inter-disciplinary research. This facility is envisaged to play a vital role in bringing industry, government, and academia together to address socio-economic issues of inter-disciplinary nature. Particularly the issues being faced by aspirational districts like Visakhapatnam.

The Director of IIM Vizag, Professor Chandrasekhar, spoke at the inauguration ceremony and elaborated that the aim of IDeAL is to act as a platform for conceptualizing, inventing, building, and valorizing product and service innovations. “For IIM-V, being a public-spirited and public-funded institution, the goal is to come up with disruptive and transformative innovations that serve a larger public purpose, public interest, and public good,” he added. Professor Chandrasekhar said IDeAL will focus, to begin with, on health care and natural resource management solutions with a view to facilitating their availability, accessibility, and affordability.

The inauguration of the new lab at IIM Vizag was graced by industry leader Dr. Jai Ganesh (MBA, Oxford University & Ph.D. IIM Bangalore), Senior Vice President & Head of Mphasis research and innovation center (NEXT Labs). On the occasion, Dr. Ganesh talked about the interplay of data sciences, artificial intelligence, and machine learning in the transformation of industry and society at large. He highlighted the importance of aspects like explainability and suitability of decision science models and solutions, for them to gain greater acceptance among the beneficiaries.

Other eminent personalities and academicians present at the inauguration were Professor Parthasarathy Ramachandran (MS & Ph.D.: Oklahoma State University), Chairman, Department of Management Studies, Indian Institute of Science, Professor Nagadevara (Ph.D.: Iowa State University), and Dr. Shivshanker Singh Patel (BTech: NIT Raipur; MTech: IIT Roorkee; and Ph.D. IISc Bangalore), Head of the IDeAL at IIM Vizag.