This article continues the series, “IQ Graduates at Work,” that follows the careers of graduates from the UALR Information Quality Graduate Program.
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.”
