Patricia Rosas (MSIQ, 2010) is a Lead Information Architect at USAA in San Antonio, Texas.  USAA is a financial services company offering insurance, banking, retirement and advice for the military community and their families.  Patricia joined USAA in 1986, and in 2012, her job changed from an IT Architect to a Lead role in USAA’s newly established  Information Architect job family.  As an Information Architect, she helps facilitate the management of USAA’s information as a reusable corporate asset.  She also recently participated as a data quality instructor, teaching a course on the use of data profiling tools and also a course on “Data Quality: Critical to Meeting USAA’s Mission” to IT practitioners at USAA.  Patricia is also a member of the Information Governance team, which is a business organization that facilitates governance activities to ensure USAA’s information is of high quality and is available to support and improve the business decisions and capabilities.  This team has developed a great working relationship with the business and IT partners across the enterprise.  At the same time, these partners have provided the necessary input to develop data quality plans, assessments, and dashboards necessary to monitor the health of critical core data.  Patricia has two roles on the governance team.  Her primary data quality role on the team is focused on the quality of USAA’s core data and information, but as an Information Architect, she is also responsible for helping to define and manage the core information assets.

The following are excerpts from a recent interview with Patricia about her background and here experience in the UALR IQ Program.

Q: How long have you been with USAA and what were some of your previous roles there?

A: Prior to my engagement with the Information Governance organization, I was in Information Technology for 25 years. I was a software developer, a systems analyst and an IT architect.  It is a great company work for and I love our tag line, “We know what it means to serve”.

Q: Where did you work before USAA?

A: I’ve been with USAA for 25 years, but I did work at a leading San Antonio gas and energy company as a software programmer after I graduated from St. Mary’s University in San Antonio, Texas.

Q: What is your undergraduate degree?

A: I grew up in a military family, but have lived in San Antonio for most of my life because my dad retired here.  He retired from the Air Force as a Captain and we did move around a lot when I was a child. We finally settled in San Antonio because my parents had family here, so most of my schooling was here. I did my undergraduate work at St. Mary’s University, graduating with a B.A. degree in Computer Science and Applied Statistics.

Q: How did you find out about the UALR IQ program?

A: I always wanted to return to school for an advanced degree – I just didn’t think it would take me 25 years to do it! But life, work and four kids tend to take priority so it did take a while before I started at UALR.  When I started looking, I was already working in the data quality field at USAA and had taken a deep interest in the impact that data quality can have on an organization.  I was looking into programs here in San Antonio but there is nothing specific to Information or Data Quality.  I was very close to taking a course load for an an MS degree in Information Security here in San Antonio – in fact I had already been accepted at a local university – when I read about the UALR IQ program on the MIT IQ web site.

Q: What was your experience in the UALR program?

A: I went through the entire IQ program as a full time remote student.  Participating in the classes remotely via my computer was never a problem – at least not at my end. There were times that classes were cancelled due to snow or ice in Little Rock but in South Texas, I was fine!  I really enjoyed Dr. Tudoreanu’s Information Visualization class and Dr. Wigand’s Data Protection and Privacy class.  In fact, I work closely with USAA’s Privacy Office and the Privacy Counsel and keep up with the changing environment around data privacy and protection. Also, I have to give a shout out to Dr. Talburt for his work on entity resolution, as this has also been quite helpful to me in the work that I do here at USAA.

Q: How have you applied what you learned in the IQ program in your current position?

A: The most valuable applications of the course work were in three areas: the privacy class, as I mentioned, because the protection and privacy of our members’ data is of utmost importance to us.  The importance and usefulness of the entity resolution class is important to us for the same reason it is important to any company: to ensure that we detect and prevent duplicate records in our databases.  We work closely with our partners in Marketing and IT to develop the right algorithms and implement the rules appropriately to reduce duplication.  The third most important application of the program comes from Dr. Pierce’s course regarding Data Governance and the quality components.  I have been able to apply her techniques to help build our data quality dashboards and also to implement a working governance structure within our organization

Q: Is there anything you want to share about family, classmates, or your mentors?

A: I have a wonderful family; they were very patient with me as I went through the program. I was working full time and going through the program as a full time student so I was pretty busy for a couple of years. But they were great and supportive and understanding and we got through it together.  I also have to say that my team at work was very helpful and supportive as well as I went through the program and we are continuing to grow and develop in the Information Quality/Information Governance discipline.

Q: Do you have any advice or encouragement for current or prospective students?

A: This is such a great program with so much valuable information. If there is anything about information quality that interests you, it is definitely worth doing.  The ability to attend remotely and interact with students in Little Rock as well as with others all over the world – literally – brings so much richness to the program.  I highly recommend it.

The post Patricia Rosas is a Leader in Information Architecture at USAA Financial Services appeared first on Information Quality Program.

Syed N. Shezan (MSIQ 2012) recently accepted a position as Solutions Consultant with Modern Analytics in San Diego, CA.  Modern Analytics is an implementation partner with SAS/DataFlux for Master Data Management (MDM), and has been working in the data analytics and data mining industry from the past 40 years.  While he was in the MSIQ program, Shezan also worked as a Data Analyst at the Arkansas Department of Education (ADE) prior to accepting the position with Modern Analytics.  At ADE Syed worked with the Students Longitudinal Data System (SLDS) where he gained experience in entity resolution and entity identity management using OYSTER.  In his current role, he will be responsible for MDM implementations using DataFlux and SQL Server that involve creating MDM Hubs and DataFlux Web Management portals for clients.

Syed believes that the MSIQ program gave him a firm foundation for his career.  According to Syed “All my new responsibilities are parallel to what I learned in Entity Resolution during my MSIQ program. Without this education, I would not be able to apply the information quality principles and rules such merging or clustering references. Entity Identity Information Management is also one of the key IQ concepts that I will be applying in my new job.”

Syed was born and reared in Hyderabad, India.  He completed his undergraduate degree in electrical and electronics engineering from Osmania University.  Even though he did not have a strong IT background at the time, his strong analytical skills allowed him to placed with Accenture right out of undergraduate school where he worked for more than two years before coming to the U.S.  At Accenture he worked in ERP and CRM applications and very-large customer databases.  This is when he first became aware of data quality issues and their impacts on business results.  Syed originally came to the U.S. to pursue an MBA in Information Technology.  While working on his MBA, he had the opportunity to work at Motorola as a CRM consultant where he again encountered data quality issues.  He first learned about the UALR IQ program, while discussing some of these issues with a friend who had recently been graduated from the program.  After learning more about the program, he decided to enter the program in June 2011.

While studying full-time at the UALR, he also worked as research assistant.  During his studies he had the opportunity to work on various database sources such as RDF, MySQL, Graph Databases, SQL, Oracle, and delimited data files.  He also learned about IQ frameworks, principles and rules, and had the opportunity to work on new tools such as Dataflux and OYSTER for Master Data Management. He also completed an ISO 8000-110 certification in Master Data Quality Management which gave him the confidence to apply his knowledge with clients. His favorite courses were Entity Resolution and IQ Tools that exposed him to many new concepts and technologies.

Syed credits the UALR IQ program for much of his current success.  In a recent interview he stated that “I now have an excellent opportunity to apply what I learned in MSIQ program under the aegis of Dr. Talburt. I could always reach out to him for assistance during our projects and during my graduate assistantship. I attended the IAIDQ student chapter meetings and OYSTER development meetings during my tenure at UALR which played a big role in learning the IQ principles and applying them to my job. The things I learned in my Principles of Information Quality, IQ Tools, and Entity Resolution courses helped me in both my graduate assistantship and my internship at Arkansas Department of Education. The Data Governance Framework I learned in Dr. Pierce’s class helped me to understand the Data Governance Maturity Model including the IBM and DataFlux models that I work with now. These skills also paved the way for my job search and gave me plenty of opportunities and offers for data quality positions with major organizations including interviews with Home Depot, ADE, Acxiom Corporation, Washington Sanitary Suburban Commission, Modern Analytics, Midwest Consulting, Tek Systems and many others.  The Entity Resolution course was probably the most helpful to me in both my internship and my current position.

I am also very grateful to my mentors, Dr. Talburt and Dr. Pierce. In addition I received tremendous help from several of my instructors including Dr. Nelson, Dr. Berleant and Dr. Agarwal in nurturing their students to become true Information Quality professionals.  I also had a close relationship with many of the students in the program as we shared our skills and gained mutual knowledge in both programming and IQ practice, especially Huzaifa Mujhtehdi and Mahmood Mohammed who were both very helpful to me.”

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In addition to his professorship at Virginia Commonwealth University, Dr. Aiken is the Founder of Data Blueprint, Inc, currently serving as President of the Data Management Association International (DAMA-I), and is an ACM Distinguished Lecturer.  In addition to managing nationwide research and development projects, Dr. Aiken is the author/co-author of seven books on information technology. Dr. Aiken publications have appeared in the Communications of the ACM, IEEE Computer, IEEE Software, the IBM Systems Journal, and a number of other journals and publications such as Information Week and USA Today.

According to Dr. Aiken, only recently (2009) has the data management (DM) profession, organized and presented to the world the first version of its body of knowledge (BoK).  In the manner of “A Framework for Analysis of Data Quality Research” (Wang, Storey, and Firth, 1995), the publication of the DM BoK presents a number of opportunities to further data quality research. His talk will circumnavigate the DM BoK for these revolutionary and evolutionary research opportunities examining in turn:

- Data Governance
- Data Architecture Management
- Data Development
- Database Operations Management
- Data Security Management
- Reference and Master Data Management
- Data Warehousing and BI Management
- Document and Content Management
- Metadata Management
- Data Quality Management

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Professor Tayi’s theme is that as both business and government continue to leverage “Big Data” in a big way, one aspect that is not receiving adequate attention is Data Quality. His talk with describe two recent projects which fall into the realm of Big Data and how they were affected by data quality issues.  He will also present an agenda for future data quality research in the Big Data context.

Professor Tayi obtained his Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon University and his research and teaching interests are interdisciplinary and span the fields of Information Systems, Operations Management and Operations Research.  His current research streams include Modeling of Supply Chains (Reverse Logistics, Product Recovery and Return Architectures), E-Commerce and Marketing, Information Sharing in Supply Chains, Economics of Information Systems (Information Security, Software Sample Design, Pricing of Information Goods), Modeling of Online Communities (Creative Commons, Digital Copyright Policies), Geographically Distributed Software Development (Process Choice, Software Quality), IS Project Outsourcing (Risk Management, Engagement Models), Data Quality and Data Mining, Models and Algorithms for Mobile Computing Environments, Online Auctions, and Grid Computing.

Professor Tayi has published over 45 refereed journal articles, has over 50 conference proceedings and presentations and several book chapters covering the above three fields.  Many of the articles appear in top-tier academic journals such as Operations Research, Management Science, MIS Quarterly, IEEE Transactions, Networks, Naval Research Logistics, EJOR, Journal of Combinatorial Optimization, INFORMS Journal of Computing, Journal of Computer Security, Government Information Quarterly, Communications of the ACM.

The post Professor Giri Kumar Tayi to Speak on Big Data and Data Quality appeared first on Information Quality Program.

Soukaina Messaoudi (MSIQ, 2011) is now a solutions developer in the addressable advertising area of Acxiom Corporation.  Acxiom Corporation, a global data management company, is well known for its multichannel marketing, addressable advertising, and database management excellence.  Acxiom is also one of the leading employers of graduates from the UALR Information Quality Graduate Program.

In her solutions developer role at Acxiom, Soukaina regularly designs projects to create files that support targeted advertising campaigns for clients.  The projects typically involve extensive data analysis and entity resolution that draw upon many of the skills that she learned and practiced in the Master of Science in Information Quality (MSIQ) program.

Soukaina is from Morocco and came to the U.S. with her sister Kamilia (MSIQ, 2011) to study computer science at Arkansas Tech University (ATU) in Russellville, Arkansas.  While completing her degree at ATU, Soukaina heard about the UALR IQ program from other ATU graduates enrolled in the UALR program.  Ultimately she decided to join the MSIQ program for two reasons.  First, she liked its originality as the only information quality graduate program in the US.  The second reason was that she found information quality to be one of the areas of computing that really seemed to fit her interests.  She had always enjoyed studying data mining and data analysis, and the UALR IQ program was a perfect fit for her to continue in that direction.

After being admitted to the MSIQ program at UALR, Soukaina and her sister Kamilia were both offered positions as a graduate research assistant under Dr. Serhan Dagtas, a professor in the UALR Information Science Department.  Both Soukaina and Kamilia worked in a research team developing and testing smart sensor networks for the US Air Force Research Laboratory at Wright Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio, where they both completed internships.  Overall, Soukaina believes that she learned a lot from these experiences and from her faculty mentors, especially conducting research and writing research papers for publication, something that she misses a lot!

Even though Soukaina was a full-time student at the UALR campus, she enjoyed meeting the many remote students in the distance education program whenever possible, especially at the information quality conferences she attended.  Her favorite classes in the program were the Introduction to Information Quality, Entity Resolution, Information Quality Tools, and Data Mining.  She enjoyed her classroom experiences and believes that she learned a lot from them, especially the fact that the classes were very interesting and applicable to the real world.  She credits the Entity Resolution course she took as playing a major role in understanding her current job responsibilities.

In Soukaina’s words “The IQ program gives you the real picture of how companies like Acxiom work.  It prepares you for the data warehouses and gives you the tools to handle them. The Entity Resolution class has helped me understand the responsibilities of my current job very well, and it is very applicable in the addressable advertising area where I work.  Knowing the IQ principles has also played a major role in analyzing the data and knowing exactly what to look for.  For all IQ students, you are in the right program!  Try to learn as much as possible and seize all the opportunities this program opens up for you. It’s a great experience, great knowledge, and most importantly, a very applicable program!”

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In addition to speakers and case studies, the Data Quality Asia Pacific Award is given each year to recognize outstanding achievements in the field of data quality, celebrate the principles that define the discipline, and highlight emerging trends.  Past winners include ACT Health (2011) and Accor Hospitality (2010).  The 2012 winner will be announced at the Sydney Conference.

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Kamilia Messaoudi (MSIQ 2012) was recently promoted to the position of Associate Delivery Analyst at Acxiom Corporation in Conway, Arkansas.  In her new role Kamilia is the primary analyst for a client team where she performs data extraction and analysis to answer questions that help the client understand the impact of data on its business.  She also handles the daily data integration tasks and works on various ad hoc telemarketing projects.

Acxiom Corporation is a marketing technology and services company that offers several different marketing and information management services, including multichannel marketing, addressable advertising and database management. Acxiom collects and analyzes customer information for clients to help them target advertising campaigns, score leads, and more.

Kamilia also has to address a lot of data quality problems in her job, especially problems with files arriving daily from the various data vendors that support the client solution.  She often has to use a combination of SQL queries and UNIX commands and scripts to solve these problems.  This is probably the reason that her favorite courses in the MSIQ program were INFQ 7342 Information Quality Tools and Industry Landscape and INFQ 7348 Entity Resolution and Information Quality that gave her so much experience using a variety of data quality techniques and tools.

Kamilia has made a long journey to her current position.  She was born and raised in Morocco and only came to the U.S. in 2007.  She started her undergraduate studies in Al Akhawayn University in Morocco.  Later she came to the U.S. and completed her bachelor’s degree in computer science at Arkansas Tech University (ATU) in Russellville.

While studying at ATU, Jerry Wood, her undergraduate network class instructor and a student in the UALR Integrated Computing PhD Program, told her about the UALR Information Quality Graduate Program.  After he described his research to Kamilia, she became interested in information quality and in 2010 applied for and was accepted into the MSIQ program.

During her two years of study at UALR, she also worked as a graduate research assistant.  She worked under the supervision of Dr. Serhan Dagtas, a professor in the Information Science Department.  Their research focused on wireless sensor networks.  They investigated different data fusion techniques to enhance data quality, improving the decision making process, and solving the problem of optimal sensor placement.  As a result their work, she co-authored three research papers with Dr. Dagtas and her sister, Soukaina Messaoudi, who was also in the MSIQ program at the same time.  Her papers include “Bayesian Data Fusion for Smart Environments with Heterogeneous Sensors” in the Journal of Computing Sciences in Colleges, “Efficient Information Processing in Smart Environments with Heterogeneous Wireless Sensor Networks” in the Proceedings of the Acxiom Laboratory for Applied Research Annual Conference, and “Dempster-Shafer based Information Quality Processing in Smart Environments” in the Proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Information Quality.

One of the high-points of her studies at UALR was the opportunity to participate two semesters of internship at Tec^Edge in Dayton, Ohio.  There she worked with other students and faculty members doing wireless sensor research sponsored by Sensors Division of the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory at Wright Patterson Air Force Base.

As Kamilia tells it “I had a great learning and working experience in the IQ program, and I am sure that current students or prospective students will have same experience.  Just study hard, enjoy the great classes schedule and enjoy the semesters breaks because guess what!! YOU will never have that awesome schedule in your future work!  Because I am dealing with databases and data in my current position, I was able to witness a lot of data quality issues. Now each company will deal with these issues in different ways, but the aim is to fix the data to enhance the reliability of the company’s data and improve its clients’ profitability.”

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The Center for Identity was founded in the fall of 2010 and Dr. Suzanne Barber, AT&T Endowed Professor in Engineering at UTA, serves as the Center Executive Director.  The University of Arkansas at Little Rock (UALR) has been an Academic Partner and active participant in the Center for Identity since its formation, and Dr. Yinle Zhou, formerly a student in the UALR Information Quality Graduate Program and now an Architect in the IBM InfoSphere MDM Group, was the winner of the best Academic Paper Award at the First Annual ID360 conference held in April 2012.  Other academic partners include Indiana University, Syracuse University, and The University of Tulsa.  There are more than 30 other government agencies and business that also support the Center including IBM, LexisNexis, VISA, the FBI, US Marshals Service, and US Secret Service.

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The Ballou-Pazer Competition and Award was instituted at the 2007 International Conference on Information Quality (ICIQ) in honor of Professors Emeritae Donald Ballou, University at Albany School of Business, and Harold Pazer, Washington State University, to honor their ground breaking work to investigate information quality from the information system perspective.  The Ballou-Pzaer Award recognizes the dissertations that demonstrate the most significant contributions to the information quality field within the two calendar years prior to the annual International Conference on Information Quality.  This year’s awards will be given at the ICIQ in Paris, France, November 15-17, 2012.

Past winners of the award include:

Members of the Award Committee include Dr. Rolf Wigand (Chair), University of Arkansas at Little Rock, Dr. Markus Helfert, Dublin City University, Dr. Yang Lee, Northeastern University, Dr. Stuart Madnick, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dr. Felix Naumann, Hasso Plattner Institut, and Dr. Richard Wang, Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

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