Of course I am riffing
Miami Vice is an American crime drama television series. The series ran for five seasons on NBC from September 16, 1984, to June 28, 1989, airing on Friday nights. Unlike traditional police procedurals, Miami Vice drew upon 1980s culture such as contemporary rock and pop music, fashion, and sports cars (such as the Ferrari Testarossa and Lamborghini Countach).
I joined Cornell PhD program in 1986, and Miami Vice was one of the TV shows (others included Star Trek and Johnny Carson) that I watched regularly in addition to watching movies, recall Portrait of an Academic Capitalist as a Young Man), and so after taking the 3rd semester PhD qualifying exams in January 1988, I decided to spend a week in Miami, and stayed with my IIT-Madras classmates who were students at FAU, Florida Atlantic University, which evidently is nicknamed Find Another University!
The announcement this past week (WSJ) that CMU will be expanding to Miami – with money coming from a high-profile Miami resident – appears to be indeed actualizing this!
Ken Griffin Is Making the Largest Donation to Higher Education in U.S. History
Citadel CEO’s gift will launch a Carnegie Mellon University campus in Miami
It is as if I was conducting advance reconnaissance!
In 2004, SmartOps engaged with HP Latin America (headquartered in Miami) on a Proof-of-Value (see Darden Case on SmartOps that describes this pioneering approach in selling enterprise software), and so my team and I spent quite a bit of time there, enjoying the night life after a rigorous analytical day, and, yes, we got the deal, and this was an important deal because HP is a core SAP (ERP and APS) customer, and them selecting SmartOps as an add on to that stack meant that we were going to be successful in many other Fortune 500/Global 2000 companies that are also SAP customers, and indeed, that did turn out to be the case.
In 2008, I went down to Miami to test-drive, and then purchase, a Ferrari, which I still enjoy very much. In 2011, we did our SmartOps Annual Forum (Conversational Vita, at Ritz Carlton on South Beach), with a customer appreciation dinner in Versace Mansion. In 2019, I was back in Miami for American Society of Transplant Surgeons annual meeting (Fix the Mix). In 2023, I was a keynote speaker at Schonfeld annual meeting, presenting quantum-inspired algorithm for a hedge fund problem, in collaboration with Quantbot Technologies. In 2025, I went to see the F1 (where McLaren, which I also own now, took the top two spots with ease).
So: Really looking forward to CMU Miami!
And, excited to read Nitin Nohria’s new book The CEO (and thanks Nitin for sending me a personalized copy!), and, unrelatedly, delighted that our paper (with University of Pittsburgh colleagues) has been accepted for publication in ACM Post-Quantum and Quantum-based Security:
Sequential vs. Synchronized Entanglement Swapping: QKD Secret-Key Rate under Optimized Link-Layer Control.
