World Class Faculty
To see a directory listing of our faculty members, please click here.
Career Path
Education
Ph.D in Information Systems & M.S. in Industrial Engineering and Operations Research
University of Texas at Austin
B.Tech in Mechanical Engineering
Indian Institute of Technology, Chennai
Selected Publications
For selected publications, please click here
Email: rk2x@andrew.cmu.edu
Ramayya Krishnan
Professor of Management Science and Information Systems
Courses Taught
- 95-705: Telecommunications Management
- 95-730: Electronic Commerce
- 95-722: Digital Transformation
Interview
I know that you had a major hand in designing the MISM program. What was the idea behind it?
The idea was to cross train students in technology and in management. To add meat to those words, I mean, anyone can say "oh we cross train students", What does that mean? It's not about taking M courses in technology and M courses in management. But rather we have faculty that actually teach courses, telecommunications management is an example, e-business is an example, where you have this blending of technology and management within the context of the particular course. So the goal isn't to say "go take 5 courses in computer science, go take 5 courses in business and you figure out for yourself how to connect the two together." I think this program is successful, and will be successful if it puts out students who: a) were cross trained in the sense of truly understanding what the implications are for business and for organizations of technology and truly understanding what it takes for these organizations to truly gain value from the technology. b) are able to communicate with others and then work in groups. You need to be able to convince others of your opinions and take people along, which is really a leadership skill. So, I would be very happy if the students coming out of this program have the cross training that I talked about and are good communicators.
Can you talk a little more about the specific goals of this program?
I think one of the goals of this program is to give students well understood principles that will stand them in good stead down the road, but at the same time, tell them about emerging trends, I mean, as a university, you want to be forward-looking. You want to look out and say "what are the likely trends that are going to emerge" and then the third piece is telling them how they can add value immediately. We want to give the students the ability to immediately add value, give them forward looking trends, and teaching them how to learn. I think the most important part of this program is not about teaching them this, this, and that. But teaching them how to learn because throughout the course of their career they're going to have to constantly update themselves. So this learning to learn is an important learning objective of this program, I think.
Career Path
Intern
Xerox PARC
Intern
JP Morgan London
Visiting student
RIACS, NASA Ames ResearchCenter
Co-founder
PGuardian Technologies, Inc.
Education
Ph.D & M.S. in Information Management and Systems
University of California, Berkeley
M.S. in Econometrics & Mathematical Economics
London School of Economics and Political Science
M.Litt.
Trinity College, Dublin
Laurea in Economics
University of Rome
Selected Publications
For selected publications, please click here
Email: acquisti@andrew.cmu.edu
Alessandro Acquisti
Assistant Professor of Information Systems and Public Policy
Courses Taught
- 95-762: Privacy in the Digital Age
- 95-710: Economic Analysis
Interview
Why do you teach?
Currently I teach "economic analysis" and "privacy in the digital age." The former is an introductory microeconomics course with applications in information technology and ecommerce. The latter is an "holistic" course about the role, the technologies, and the economic implications of privacy. Both are exciting to teach but present different hurdles. For instance, some students dislike, by default, economics. I can relate to that - when I started studying economics in Rome, I was not that excited by it either. Then I met a professor that changed my view and appreciation of this area. Nowadays, I would love to be that professor for my students.
What do you like about being here?
The School attracts very smart students with different backgrounds - quantitative thinkers, journalists, even musicians. You can have all kind of interesting interactions with them. Carnegie Mellon also attracts many students in security and privacy (which are my research interests), so it's fun to interact and collaborate with them on projects. In fact, if you are serious about privacy and security research, one could say that Carnegie Mellon is the place to be right now in the United States. The critical mass of researchers and students interested in this area - from so many angles - and the associated economies of scale are so exciting; the opportunities for intellectual exchange they generate make this place unique.
What would you like your student to learn from you?
I would like for them to learn concepts and methodologies that they will use in other courses and in their professional activities, and even in the rest of their lives - when they read the Wall Street Journal or the New York Times, or when they critically interpret the nuances of a policy discussion: the ability to understand what is being said between the lines, and detect the mistakes or even the misrepresentations in an argument.
Career Path
Founder and Sr. Vice President
TalkShoe
President
Renaissance Consulting
President and CEO
Haley Systems
CEO
MediaSiteEducation
Education
MBA
Stanford University
B.S. Engineering
Princeton
Email:
Mark Juliano
Adjunct Professor
Courses Taught
- High Tech Marketing
- Entrepreneurship
Interview
What one thing do you think your students need to learn from you?
They need to have a sense of success - they need to drive for success - even when everyone is telling them 'no'. Because they will hear a lot on 'no's - 'no you can't have money,' 'no I don't think you'll be able to make this work'. They need to be able to succeed anyway. Most important, though, is the real world experience. It's all about real world experience.
Where do you envision your field going in the next five or ten years?
Well, I think we're finding this right now: marketing over the internet. E-zines. Podcasts. Bloggers. It's grassroots. We need to figure out where people get their information. People are reading less and less, instead, people are using personal information gadgets. They're getting their information on their cell phones second to second.
What do you do outside of the university and why do you teach?
I've started four companies, and I'm currently the CEO and head of marketing. First, I teach because I enjoy teaching. I enjoy teaching dedicated, hardworking students. But I also think it's important to give back the knowledge I've gained.
What is your teaching philosophy?
I use case studies - I've written three. Real world studies. Students also do a real world project.
Career Path
Senior Member of the Technical Staff
SEI
Senior Technical Staff
IBM
Education
Ph.D. in Mathematics
Polytechnic Institute of New York
M.S. in Mathematics
New York University
B.S. in Mathematics
New York University
Email: nrm@sei.cmu.edu
Nancy Mead
Adjunct Faculty
Courses Taught
Interview
Briefly describe the focus of your research. What have you been working on recently?
My primary research interests are in the areas of information security, software requirements engineering, and software architectures. Right now, software engineers build a system and then they try to make it secure, but by then it is too late. I'm helping software engineers make products secure on the front end by developing better practices in the software development process. With CyLab and student help, we're developing a tool to support security requirements engineering process. There are nine steps, and some of them are now automated. The next step is to develop tutorial material for the system.
What kinds of projects have you collaborated with students on?
We've done requirements engineering projects; we've analyzed existing systems. We've worked on access control. Students at GM have introduced new development processes and installed new software systems.
What is the most important thing you hope the students learn from you?
I hope they learn how to analyze problems so they can solve them. The hands-on, real-life experience they get is important. It's harder than an exam.
Career Path
Senior Member, Technical Staff
Software Engineering Institute
Associate Professor
Naval Postgraduate School
Education
Ph.D, M.S., and B.S. in Information and Computer Science
University of California, Irvine
Email: tjs@cert.org
Timothy J Shimeall
Adjunct Professor
Courses Taught
- Intro to Info Security Mgmt
- Information Warfare
- Information Assurance Policy
- Executive Role in Info Survivability
Interview
What is your teaching philosophy?
I want to engage students' interest. I want to bring pertinent, active security information to class. I want the students to 'own' the problems. In my classes, I tune the course to the students. My goal is to stimulate interaction, to see them as people, not just students.
Could you briefly describe the focus of your research?
My research interests are in network survivability, particularly with reference to building awareness needed for defense of large-scale networks (i.e., those involving greater than 1,000,00 hosts). This awareness involves multiple factors, including insider threat (including work done on building empirical understanding of this threat as well as theoretic modeling), network traffic analysis (at both packet and network flow levels), fused-source analysis (involving technical information, such as host and network logs, and also involving non-technical information, such as social and economic factors that may motivate network intrusion). I retain an active interest in the areas of software testing, software safety and analysis of network security policy.
Where do you envision your field going in the next five years?
Well, the security problems are going to get worse in the near term, but further in the future there is hope. Communities are forming. I think we need to get more collaborative. We need to get out of 'hero' mode and get into a more process based model. But for now, we are still trying to build consistent awareness.
Career Path
Senior Lecturer, Director of Undergraduate Programs (CS)
University of Pittsburgh
Assistant Professor of Computer and Information Systems
Community College of Allegheny County
Education
M.S. in Information Science
University of Pittsburgh
B.A. in Philosophy
University of Pittsburgh
Email: mm6@andrew.cmu.edu
Michael McCarthy
Associate Teaching Professor
Courses Taught
- Applied Cryptography
- Service Oriented Arch.
- Data Structures and Algorithms
- Organizational Communication & Distributed Object Technologies
Interview
Briefly describe the focus of your research. What have you been working on recently?
I try to keep the program on the cutting edge. I closely track standards bodies like the W3C, IETF and OASIS. I try to find the technologies that have staying power. For example, I'm teaching a new course on service oriented architectures. We will be studying service oriented design patterns and we will implement those patterns. Web Services are just starting out and they're a really hot topic. I think they will get more important. Also, as data is being moved about cryptography and cryptographic protocols are becoming increasingly important. Computers may be inexpensive but data is becoming the most valuable and crucial part of a business. I am also interested in the semantic web. By offering classes on these topics, we're pushing the envelope a little bit.
What kinds of projects have you collaborated with students on?
GM has a diagnostic system where they plug the vehicle's computer into their system. We want to make that wireless, but there are security implications to that. You don't want have someone driving down the street disabling your brakes from their cell phone. Other projects I've worked with students on are: Portfolio construction and trade management with mobile access for Putnam Investments; Evaluation of ESB's for Bank of America; Multimodal (voice and web) customer care applications for Convergys; Materials tracking using RFID and barcodes for Caterpillar.
What one thing do you think your students should learn from you?
Play your hardest and don't be intimidated!
Career Path
Research Assistant
MIT
Senior Consultant
Booz Allen & Hamilton
Advanced Telecommunications Engineering
GTE Systems
Strategic Market Sales
GTE Telephone Operations
Product Manager
GTE Spacenet
Education
Ph.D in Management Science and Information Technology
MIT Sloan School of Management
MS in Telecommunications
University of Maryland
BS in Electrical Engineering
University of Maryland
Email: mds@cmu.edu
Michael D. Smith
Associate Professor of Information Systems
Courses Taught
- Marketing I
- Marketing II
- 95-722 Digital Transformation
Interview
Briefly describe the focus of your research. Can you tell us what you've found?
I think about the nature of structure and competition in electronic markets and how this is different from conventional markets. Early in the development of the Internet, the conventional wisdom was that the Internet would be a nearly perfect market where the intense price competition between firms would reduce the importance of brand and product differentiation. Our research has challenged this view by finding that, if anything, price dispersion is higher in electronic markets than in conventional markets, that consumers respond very strongly to brand online, and that consumer surplus gains from increased product variety online are about ten times larger than consumer surplus gains from lower prices.
Have you collaborated with students on any of your work?
Yes, the students are great at it. They're dedicated, committed, innovative, and definitely creative.
What would you like your students to leave your class with?
The ability to understand how technology changes business practice and industry structure today; and the ability to evaluate these changes long into their future careers. But most importantly, I want the students to leave with the ability to think - to use that understanding to think about new technologies and business practices.
Career Path
Teaching Professor of Information Systems
Carnegie Mellon University
Visiting Associate Professor
The Wharton School
Mathematician
U.S. Coast Guard R&D Center
Education
Ph.D in Decision Sciences
University of Pennsylvania
M.S. in Mathematics
University of Rhode Island
B.S. in Mathematics
Suffolk University
Email: roehrig@andrew.cmu.edu
Stephen F. Roehrig
Teaching Professor
Courses Taught
- JavaObject Oriented Analysis and Design
- Decision-making Under Uncertainty
- Privacy and Confidentiality: Models & Implementations
Interview
What makes your privacy and confidentiality elective so great?
It's fascinating how many ways there are to take some apparently innocuous data about people and discover other things about them, whether by merging multiple data sets or comparing data sets. There are many ways to overcome privacy limitations. It's kind of a cat and mouse game. We disguise the data, but still make it usable for policy purposes. Someone will find a way to overcome that disguising technique. Then we have to find a way to make that technique better. We've really had a terrific time in the class, it's usually only 10 or 12 people and everybody gets involved.
How do you bring your research into the classroom?
Privacy and Confidentiality is kind of a survey course. We don't go into all the gory mathematical details, but I try to give them an intuition. If they have the intuition, then they can translate it to future problems as they come up. With that intuition they can make better decisions. We read a lot, and we talk a lot about the good and bad in what we've read.
What do you want students to leave your Java class with?
I want students to be able to write programs intelligently, to write programs that are understandable and maintainable and extensible. If you haven't seen good writing, there's no way you can write well, so I try to show them good code, so they can write good code.
Career Path
Professor of Information Systems
Carnegie Mellon University
Education
Ph.D in Urban and Public Affairs
Carnegie Mellon University
M.S. in Industrial Engineering
Pennsylvania State University
B.S. in Industrial Engineering
Pennsylvania State University
Email: wg0g@andrew.cmu.edu
Wilpen L. Gorr
Professor of Public Policy and Management Information Systems
Courses Taught
- Geographic Information Systems
- Web GIS
Interview
Briefly describe the focus of your research. Can you tell us what you've produced?
I'm a very applied person; I use information technology in combination with predictive models. Much of my recent work has been in the public safety area - criminal justice. For several years I've been pursuing use of geographic information systems. Police on the street have only limited resources, and it seems that it would be helpful if they had an idea of where and when crimes might be or will be occurring, so that they can go either enforce laws or prevent crimes . So it's a perspective of looking into the future as opposed to reacting. Our county is probably the only county in the country out of over 3,000 counties that has a data warehouse for policy making. And I get use it in student projects. There are some 600 agencies whose data are pulled into the system. As a result we can do things that nobody else can do because it's integrated. Everyone's got personal identifiers so we can track people through the system and across the county, even though the data that we get has the identifiers masked to protect privacy.
What do you enjoy about teaching?
I like teaching lecture classes in new areas; for example, I think that I was the first in the country to teach Web-based programming for geographic information systems in a professional master degree program. I also really like teaching project courses. I like to see students grow in their capacity to work in teams and on complicated problems.
What word or two would you use to describe the MISM student?
Multi-disciplinary. That's the essential characteristic of the University, and I think the MISM program certainly has that with its blend of management and technology. Up to date.
Career Path
Senior Vice President & CIO
EDMC
CIO
St. Clair Hospital
CIO
St. Francis Health System
CIO
Allegheny Health Education and Research Foundation
Education
M.S. Public Management
Carnegie Mellon University
B.A. in Economics
University of Pittsburgh
Leadership Certificate
Katz School, University of Pittsburgh
Email: ck0t@andrew.cmu.edu
Chris A. Kowalsky
Adjunct Professor
Courses Taught
- Management of Computers and Information Systems
Interview
Why do you teach?
I teach to learn. I learn on the job and bring it to the class. I learn in the classroom and bring it to the job. It really goes both ways.
What word or two would you use to describe the MISM student?
Seeking knowledge. They've got their eyes wide open and ask hard questions. They've got a passion for learning to solve problems and identify solutions. Energetic. Passionate.
What would you like your students to leave your class with?
I want them to have a strong appreciation for how value is created by an information technology (IT) and management of IT. I think case studies and experience are the most valuable in class, so that when you perform on the job , you know why you're doing it. I talk about how theoretical matter is applied from live experiences from either me or my guest speakers. This material isn't available everywhere: legal, planning, project implementation, quality management, security, risk management, and IT best practices, I cover everything that matters to be highly successful with IT.
