University Research

Mohammad Anas Wahaj | 22 dec 2015

Design education promises to inculcate and enhance creativity within students and equip them with skills to build and develop products, services, spaces and environments in diverse industries. Given below is the select list of America's top design academics and educators from the disciplines of architecture, industrial design, interior design and landscape architecture, that was created with inputs from design professionals, academic department heads and students - Amale Andraos (Architecture, Planning & Preservation at Columbia University); Alan DeFrees (Architecture at University of Notre Dame); Dawn Finley (Architecture at Rice University); Steve French (Architecture at Georgia Tech); Geraldine Forbes Isais (Architecture & Planning at University of New Mexico); Charles Graham (Architecture at University of Oklahoma); Aki Ishida (Architecture & Design at Virginia Tech); Kent Kleinman (Architecture & Interior Design at Cornell University); Sharon Kuska (Architecture & Civil Engineering at University of Nebraska); Alison Kwok (Architecture at University of Oregon); Mohsen Mostafavi (Architecture & Design at Harvard University); Daniel Nadenicek (Planning & Landscape at University of Georgia); Guy Nordenson (Architecture & Structural Engineering at Princeton University); Juhani Pallasmaa (Architect & Lecturer from Helsinki. Visiting Professor at Washington University in St. Louis & University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign); James Rose (Architecture & Design at University of Tennessee); Hashim Sarkis (Architecture & Planning at Massachusetts Institute of Technology); Jeff Shannon (Architecture at University of Arkansas); Robert Shibley (Architecture & Planning at SUNY Buffalo); Christine Theodoropoulos (Architecture & Environment Design at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo); James Timberlake (Architecture at University of Pennsylvania); Ada Tremonte (Architecture & Interior Design at Drexel University); Rod Underwood (Architecture &' Planning at Ball State University); Adam Wells (Architecture at University of Houston); Jim West (Architecture, Art, & Design at Mississippi State University); Keith Wiley (Architecture & Environmental Design at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo). Read on...

DesignIntelligence: 25 Most Admired Educators for 2016
Author: NA

Mohammad Anas Wahaj | 13 dec 2015

It has been observed in many cases that science fiction writers have talked about products that became reality later on. For example earbud headphones were first mentioned by Ray Bradbury in his classic novel 'Fahrenheit 451'. Emphasis on technological development and advancement is also part of economic agendas of many nations. Japan is one country that gives siginificant importance to merging technology with social and economic development. Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and his economic roadmap, often termed as 'Abenomics', puts technologies like Internet of Things (IoT), big data, robotics and artificial intelligence (AI) at the core of his revitilization strategy. Japan leads the world with its strength in robotics by bringing out the first personal robot 'Pepper'. But the robot lacks the expected intelligence as it couldn't pass the Turing Test which is a benchmark in AI to determine how close the machine thinks like humans. Although Japan's strength in industrial robotics is visible but it lags the advancements in IoT, big data and AI. According to Prof. Mitsuru Ishizuka of Waseda University and University of Tokyo, 'Japan is considerably behind the United States in 'deep learning', a central technology in AI, although the country is working hard to catch up...These companies (Google, Facebook, IBM etc) can invest big money in AI and add the resulting new values to their services. In Japan, there are much smaller companies with specific AI technologies.' IBM developed Watson, an AI computer, and over the years it has evolved into multiple applications. The computer's core framework reflects human decision-making (observe, interpret, evaluate, decide) but its data crunching abilities are incomparable. William Saito, Japanese entrepreneur and professional cook, utilized Watson to prepare some unique recipes. Citing Watson's strengths in IoT, big data and AI, Mr. Saito comments, 'Combine Watson with a refrigerator, for instance. You go to your refrigerator and it gives you a recipe based on the food in the fridge prioritized by expiration date.' Japan's focus on creating cyborgs (humans with mechanical parts) is also understandable considering its ageing population and growing need for assisted living. Toyota is collaborating with Stanford and MIT on technologies with emphasis on creating automobiles that assist the driver for safer travel, contrary to the approaches of Google and Tesla Motors that are working on driverless cars. Mr. Saito believes that Japan has to come out of its 'Galápagos Syndrome' and strike a balance between logic and creative thinking and move from electro-mechanical robotics to thinking and self-learning machines. Prof. Masakazu Hirokawa, AI researcher at University of Tsukuba, expresses similar views on Japanese model that focuses more on technology that addresses social issues and is less about creating global solutions. He comments, 'We have the hardware to be able to do it, but the important thing is developing the software...I'm trying to create algorithms that help robots learn and predictively determine what and how humans want them to act through experience-based inferences.' Read on...

JapanToday: Artificial Intelligence - Can Japan lead the way?
Author: Richard Jolley

Mohammad Anas Wahaj | 12 dec 2015

Experts suggest that computers have to think more like humans to make artificial intelligence and smart machines more successful. Scientists are now able to create an algorithm that captures the unique human ability to grasp new concepts from a single example in a study involving learning unfamiliar handwritten alphabet characters. Cognitive and data scientist Brenden Lake of New York University says, 'We aimed to reverse-engineer how people learn about these simple visual concepts.' According to Prof. Joshua Tenenbaum of Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 'Standard algorithms in machine-learning require tens, hundreds or even thousands of training examples to yield similar results.' Prof. Ruslan Salakhutdinov of University of Toronto says, 'This new work would help guide progress in artificial intelligence by leading to next-generation intelligent machines that hopefully will come close to displaying human-like intelligence.' Prof. Lake suggests that the approach used in the study might also be applicable to machine learning for many other tasks like speech and object recognition. Read on...

The Japan Times: Scientists coax computers to think more like people
Author: NA

Mohammad Anas Wahaj | 10 dec 2015

According to the recent Morgan Stanley Research report, 'Can Demographics Reverse Three Multi-Decade Trends?', by Prof. Charles Goodhart of London School of Economics, Manoj Pradhan of Morgan Stanley, and Pratyancha Pardeshi of Morgan Stanley, the age of the abundant labor available to the global economy for the last few decades is coming to an end, spelling the end of the deflationary super-cycle and the era of zero interest rates. The demographic 'sweet-spot' was the result of plummeting birth rates and longer life spans from 1970 onwards. Moreover the collapse of the Soviet Union and China's entry into the global trading system made the conditions even sweeter. The working age cohort was 685 million in the developed world in 1990. The work pool of globalized market was more then doubled by China and eastern Europe together adding 820 million. Prof. Goodhart says, 'It was the biggest 'positive labour shock' the world has ever seen. It is what led to 25 years of wage stagnation.' But now the shift is expected to happen leading to scarcity of labor and rise in wages. The balance of power will shift towards workers and there would be a reversal in the rise of inequality that has been happening within economies. 'We are at a inflection point,' says Prof. Goodhart. The report explains that healthcare and ageing costs will drive fiscal expansion, while scarce labour will set off a bidding war for workers, all spiced by a state of latent social warfare between the generations. Prof. Goodhart comments, 'We are going back to an inflationary world.' In a recent speech, Andrew Haldane of The Bank of England, cautions that we may be stuck in a zero-interest trap for as far as the eye can see, with little left to fight the next downturn. Mr. Haldane said, 'Central banks may find themselves bumping up against the 'Zero Lower Bound' (ZLB) constraint on a recurrent basis.' The report made few assumptions. It discounts the role of automation and robots in offsetting the labor shortages. It also doubts the effects of demographic dividend of India and Africa, with increasing working age population, by citing lack of infrastructural support to repeat the 'China Phenomenon'. The report also debunks the claims made by French economist Thomas Piketty in his book 'Capital in the 21st Century', that the return on capital outpaces the growth of the economy over time, leading ineluctably to greater concentrations of wealth in an unfettered market system i.e. the rich will further gain from investments while the condition of the poor will continue to worsen. Read on...

The Telegraph: The world economy as we know it is about to be turned on its head
Author: Ambrose Evans-Pritchard

Mohammad Anas Wahaj | 09 dec 2015

U.S. spends a total of US$ 2.8 trillion on healthcare and surprisingly about half of it is spent on just 5% of the general population. To expand healthcare reach the general solution is to spend more money. But Prof. David S. Buck of Baylor College of Medicine and director of the Primary Care Innovation Center (PCIC) in Houston (Texas, US), explains that spending more money, specifically in Harris County, has yielded poor outcomes, no coordination between healthcare providers and no safety net system for those most in need. According to him the healthcare system is non-existent in the region and it is merely a grouping of medical silos. The nonprofit PCIC is working towards creating a true healthcare system to reach the most vulnerable and most medically expensive residents, and provide affordable and better healthcare overall by reducing hospital costs. PCIC is first identifying 'super-utilizers', a small group of patients that are extremely sick and costly. These patients utilize most of the healthcare services and are generally treated in emergency rooms. Health staff after identifying these 'super-utilizers' will work with them individually and develop a treatment and care plan for better management of their health issues. This will finally reduce their hospital emergency visits and lower healthcare costs. Delay in treating small problems leads them to become emergencies and bring inefficiencies in the health system along with increased difficulties to patients. Prof. Buck suggests an integrated database of these patients for timely and effective treatment and care. According to him, 'Developing a safety net takes time, commitment and shared data...If hospitals share data, it won't just improve the institution's bottom line; it'll improve care for the community...We also need school systems to share data, so that we can learn how health and social factors are linked, and improve the health of students and their families.' Read on...

Houston Chronicle: Medical data-sharing could curb cost of 'super-utilizers'
Author: David S. Buck

Mohammad Anas Wahaj | 09 dec 2015

While peer recommendations and other customer's views have an important influence on purchasing decisions, but an experiment by Cranfield University's Prof. Hugh N. Wilson, Prof. Emma K. Macdonald and doctoral student Shane Baxendale, identified another influential touchpoint that is mostly ignored by marketers: observing what other customers actually do. They analyzed brand touchpoints of 14000 people from N. America and Europe over a week. The data was collected as text message by using research agency MESH Experiences's real-time experience tracking approach. The people were asked to report their experiences of a brand in one of four categories: mobile handsets, soft drinks, technology products, and electrical goods. The results collected from 69000 text messages found that observing other customers in influencing purchase decisions is as important as word-of-mouth recommendations for mobile handsets and soft drinks, and even more important in case of technology products and electrical goods. The experiment overall found that peer observation was equal in importance to the costly brand advertising. Similar thinking that Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman, psychologist and economist, termed as 'System 1 Thinking' also applies in consumer behavior: with many decisions to take, it saves effort to assume that if others are using a product, it's probably good. For marketers, the researchers have the following suggestions - (1) It's important to think about distinctive branding for the product in use not just for the purchase moment. (2) If decision-making is made by the group rather than the individual, marketers can try to win the group. (3) Expose normally invisible customer behaviors to their peers. (4) Build in peer observation to product launches. Read on...

Harvard Business Review: What Really Makes Customers Buy a Product
Authors: Hugh N. Wilson, Emma K. Macdonald, Shane Baxendale

Mohammad Anas Wahaj | 03 dec 2015

According to Wikipedia, 'Employee Experience' is defined as 'What an employee received during their interaction with careers' elements (e.g. firms, supervisors, coworkers, customer, environment, etc.) that affect their cognition and affection and leads to their particular behaviors.' Professor Kaveh Abhari of University of Hawaii at Manoa conceptualized 'Employee Experience Management' (EEM) as 'An approach to deliver excellent experience to employees, which leads to the positive customer experience by emphasizing on their experiential needs.' Successful and future-focused organizations are both customer- and employee-centric, and they shift away from thinking of work as just a utility and emphasise on creating 'beautiful experiences', a term used by Pat Wadors (Chief Human Resource Officer of Linkedin). Jacob Morgan, entrepreneur and author of 'The Future of Work', defines three employee experience environments that all organizations must focus on - physical, cultural and technological. Here he explains the nature of physical environment and its impact on employee experience. Physical environment includes - Demographics; Workplace Perks; Workplace Layout; Workplace Creative. There is a strong correlation between employee well-being and employee productivity and performance, and physical workspace is one of the largest factor for well-being. Mr. Morgan's suggestions regarding the physical aspects of work environment include - (1) Focus on multiple ways of working: According to Gensler employees need spaces to focus, collaborate, learn, and socialize. Organizations need to shift away from having a single floor plan to integrating and incorporating multiple floor plans. (2) Make the space reflect the culture: Organizations should make efforts to build an environment that reflect their values and culture. (3) Look at how employees work: Engage with employees and ask what they value and care about at work and make investments in those areas. (4) Treat physical space like software: Just the way software is continuously iterated, upgraded and evolves, organizations should use the same process to bring necessary transformations in the work space. Read on...

Forbes: How The Physical Workspace Impacts The Employee Experience
Author: Jacob Morgan

Mohammad Anas Wahaj | 10 nov 2015

Prof. Nouriel Roubini, an economist at New York University, came to fame as 'Dr. Doom' when he predicted the US housing bubble crash of 2007-2008. Following are seven ideas about the global economy that he shared in a recent event - (1) Aging population and the end of the 'golden era': Worldwide economic slowdown; Governments and private sector is saving more and spending less; Aging population is changing consumption model; Individuals are inclined towards saving. (2) China - expect a "bumpy landing" but no crash: Slowdown but no complete collapse; 5-6% potential growth next year. (3) On Silicon Valley: Localized technological and scientific innovation at specific hubs like Silicon Valley; Not leading to productivity growth, that is key to the growth of global economy. (4) Are robots taking over our jobs?: Shrinks demand for labor; Will bring changes to labor force structure and therefore structure of the economy. (5) The central banks are broken: Government policies are not optimal; Instruments of monetary policy seem ineffective; Fiscal policy instruments are not used to their full potential; Need for structural reforms globally, which is a challenging task. (6) The hyped-up Grexit: Lot of attention to Greek exit; Greece is only 2% of European GDP; Grexit will have political implications and potential to transform Eurozone. (7) Commodity super cycle: End of commodity super cycle; Economic slowdown in China; Supply issues like innovative shell gas, oil tech, and significant reserves in Latin America and Africa; Low demand for raw materials. Read on...

FinBuzz: 7 ways the global economy is going to change, according to Nouriel Roubini
Author: NA

Mohammad Anas Wahaj | 30 oct 2015

According to recent research regarding consumer psychology by marketing professors Gina S. Mohr of Colorado State University, Margaret C. Campbell of the University of Colorado, and Peeter W. J. Verlegh of the University of Amsterdam, 'Consumers remember and like products better after seeing covert marketing, such as a product placement in a sitcom, but reminding them that product placement is "marketing" eliminates the effect.' Prof. Campbell, the lead invesigator of the study, comments 'Frankly, we were a bit surprised at the power of covert marketing across a variety of studies. Even though most US consumers know that marketers pay to surreptitiously get their brands in front of consumers, consumers are still influenced by covert marketing efforts.' Prof. Mohr adds, 'In the US there has been some reluctance to incorporate disclosures for fear that it may interfere with creative content. This research suggests that product placement disclosures need not occur at the time of product placement to be effective.' Researchers suggest that the study provides support for the idea that requiring disclosure after exposure to covert marketing would give information to consumers that helps them make better decisions. Read on...

domain-b: Consumers resist influence of covert marketing when paid placements are disclosed
Author: NA

Mohammad Anas Wahaj | 14 oct 2015

According to a recent report by Commonwealth Fund, 'U.S. Health Care from a Global Perspective: Spending, Use of Services, Prices, and Health in 13 Countries', based on data by OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development) and other cross-national analyses, the US spent US$ 9086 per person on healthcare in 2013, which corresponds to 17.1% of GDP. This was about 50% more than the second highest spender (France-11.6% of GDP) and almost twice of what UK (8.8%) spent. In US if the patients are unable to pay their healthcare bills, it either becomes a bad debt for the patient or is written off as 'charity-care', adding up to US$ 57 billion in uncompensated care. To study and analyse this aspect of healthcare, researchers from Northwestern University - David Dranove, Craig Garthwaite, and Christopher Ody - as part of The Hamilton Project by Brookings Institution, argue that there is room for efficiency improvement in the charity-care system and the supply and demand for charity care are not geographically inclined. This means that hospitals that have more resources available for charity-care, ones mostly located in high-income areas, are not located in the places where people most need it, i.e. the low-income areas. To rectify this situation, researchers propose a 'floor-and-trade' system, in which all hospitals are required to provide some charity-care to low income patients. One of the researcher, Craig Garthwaite, comments 'As the Affordable Care Act has rearranged the flows of patients to hospitals and decreased the number of uninsured Americans, it's a good time to reconsider how hospitals commit themselves to serving their surrounding communities.' Read on...

The Atlantic: Who Pays Hospital Bills When Patients Can't?
Author: Bourree Lam

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