They Work with Data and Do Some Science: How Identity Conflict Turns Data Professionals away from Data Science

Data science is widely perceived as an attractive, lucrative, and prestigious emerging occupation. Research so far has focused on understanding data scientists’ practices and identity work associated with establishing and legitimizing this new occupation. This work, however, is not sufficient to explain a phenomenon we observed whereby professionals rejected the opportunity to adopt this new occupational identity. To understand why professionals may not want to be labeled data scientists, we analyzed 43 interviews with data professionals at an educational measurement company in the U.S. Despite a clear steer from management towards the data science label, many interviewees stuck to their established professional identities. In our preliminary findings, we use the literature on identity conflict as a lens to make sense of our observations. By identifying three types of conflicts: 1) task conflict, 2) role conflict, 3) tool conflict, we begin to explain what turns professionals away from data science

SeQuential: Sustainability and Growth in the Biofuels Business

SeQuential, a vertically-integrated biodiesel company based in Portland, Oregon, pursued a more sustainable supply and production strategy than many competitors by securing inputs from used cooking oil (UCO) rather than new crops. A fragmented U.S. biodiesel industry produced more than 1.25 billion gallons of the fuel in 2016 from a mix of virgin materials and UCO, but the environmental impact of crop-based biodiesel was increasingly controversial. Meanwhile, UCO collection had grown rapidly in recent years, and with strong forecasted growth, offered a potential additional revenue stream for vertically-integrated biodiesel firms. The price of the UCO used to produce SeQuential’s biodiesel and the fuel itself were driven by commodity indices, creating a highly volatile market. In addition, industry profitability was heavily reliant on government support. This support was manifested through funding for Renewable Identification Numbers (RINs) and tax credits. The recent election of a U.S. President publicly opposed to climate change mitigation, and the re-election of a sympathetic U.S. Congress, worsened perennial uncertainty around the renewal of these policies. Tyson Keever, President and CEO of SeQuential, had guided the company through a period of major growth and vertical integration by overseeing a series of regional mergers and acquisitions. As a result, the company now faced growing pains linked to employee turnover, operational integration and efficiency, and instilling a culture of sustainability in all SeQuential employees. At the same time, SeQuential was developing a new strategy for future growth, while attempting to mitigate increased regulatory and market uncertainty. In this case, students are tasked with developing a series of strategic, mission-aligned growth proposals that address these challenges

Role of Self-generated Odor Cues in Place Cell Representation of Spatial Context

The importance of the hippocampus in the formation and retrieval of episodic memory has been famously demonstrated in the case of patient H.M. Subsequent studies conducted in animal models have provided considerable insight into the specific functions of the individual components of the hippocampus. In the rodent, the pyramidal neurons of the CA1 and CA3 regions of the hippocampus have typically been associated with the encoding of visuo-spatial cues and their utilization in navigation. These ‘place cells’ fire when the animal is in a specific part of its environment (its place field). However, these cells also encode non-spatial information from other sensory inputs, such as olfaction and audition. This study was conducted to find out how contextual odor cues are represented in the firing of CA1 place cells and whether these cues could drive stable spatial representations. One group of mice was first extensively familiarized to a cylinder containing both visual cues and preserved, self-generated odor cues. Then, after assessing place field stability across a six hour delay, the visual and odor cues were rotated in opposite directions by ninety degrees (counter-rotated). Another group of mice was familiarized only to the visual cues that were subsequently rotated. The next day stability and rotation were re-assessed in a novel cylinder. However, the odor cues of the two groups were switched: the preserved odor cues of the first group were removed, and the odor cues of the second group were now preserved across the three sessions. In a separate experiment, a third group of animals was familiarized only to the odor cues. Firstly, we found that contextual odor cues attenuated rotation with the visual cues, but only following extensive familiarization. Secondly, the removal of familiar odor cues impaired long-term stability of place fields. Third and finally, the self-generated odor cues alone were not sufficient for the generation of stable place fields in a free, open-field exploration paradigm. We therefore conclude that although they are not as dominant as discrete visual cues, highly familiarized odor cues exert a significant effect on the representation of space of the mouse CA1 place cell, illustrating the role of contextually relevant information in navigating an ever-changing world

Developing Requirements for all the Oregon All-Payerall-Claims (APAC) Database

For our group project, we sought a database that was sizeable enough to necessitate advanced Data mining techniques while being common enough that the implications of the data and the business questions are clear to the audience. Specifically, two of our team members have past or current links to the healthcare industry and that field seemed appropriate. One of our team members, working as a Graduate Intern within the Data and Information Management Enhancement (DIME) Department at Kaiser Permanente (KP), arranged for an interview with Mr. Jeff Emch, MBI , a senior analyst at KP responsible for collecting and sending claims data to the State health agency, the Oregon Health Authority (OHA). He offered the perspective of both the preparer of this data as well as the recipient of this data, having considerable experience understanding the latter’s needs. During the interview, he role-played both the persona as a KP analyst and an OHA analyst- which helped us develop an all-round understanding of the project

Operation Research Final Team Project

Optimizing the best possible routes for transporting materials, while following various capacity, demand and scheduling constraints is a fairly common problem in the manufacturing industry. For our project, we worked with SeQuential Biofuels, a company that needs to optimize transport of their raw material from their depots in California to their plant in Oregon. We used a combination of a transportation and scheduling models to create a model, that not only takes into account the dynamic nature of their constraints, but provides a holistic solution