The Tepper Network

The Social Network is a 2010 American biographical drama film directed by David Fincher and written by Aaron Sorkin. A major critical and commercial success, the film grossed $224 million on a $40 million budget.

It was wonderful to see (and hear the talks of some of) my PhD students – Jay Swaminathan, Pinar Keskinocak, John Turner – along with other Tepper PhD alums – Suresh Sethi, Masha Shunko (with plus one Serguei Netissene), M.S. Krishnan, Cevdet Aydemir, Bob Kaplan, Anindya Ghose, Madhav Rajan, Rick Staelin and Holger Sieg among others – and past faculty members – Ray Reagans and Stan Zin – at the 75^th Anniversary Academic Symposium, and reminisce about their times here – and so also visit our older office locations on campus – and then take a stroll to, and in, Phipps Conservatory (thanks Alan Scheller-Wolf for being the host!).

It was also good to hear several talks – Linda Argote, John Hooker, Holger Seig, Gerard Cornuejols, Mohit Singh– in addition to a Keynote by Thomas Sargent, and the discussions in the Dean’s panel (that included past faculty member Srikant Datar) about AI and Business Education.

I thought I would highlight a few of the papers by Jay (First Place, INFORMS Nicholson Prize), Pinar (First Place, INFORMS Teaching Case Competition) and John (First Prize, INFORMS Dantzig Dissertation Award) from their dissertations:

Managing Broader Product Lines through Delayed Differentiation Using Vanilla Boxes

Scheduling of Time-Shared Jet Aircraft

Scheduling of Dynamic In-Game Advertising

Of course, it also brought back memories for me about my own PhD days (at Cornell), and I was happy to receive a recent update about the Robin Roundy (my PhD advisor) Graduate Scholarship that I have endowed there.