Knowledge To Go: The Future of Work with Bukky Akinsanmi and Greg Hallman (May 17, 2022)

Entering the third year of the COVID pandemic, employees and firms have adapted to work from home while they are finally planning on a return to the office. The pandemic has brought seismic changes to the use of real estate, including both firms use of office space and workers use of their homes as home offices.

This was an informative webinar on how firms have dealt with changes in their use of office space and how they manage employees. Dr. Hallman discusses the effects of the pandemic on office buildings and investment in office assets by real estate investors. Professor Akinsanmi Oyedeji discusses how managers have adapted and can adapt to the new rules of work such as employees working from home, employees coming back to the office, and the effectiveness of hybrid work with some days in the office and some at home.

You can view the recording of the content presented by Professor Greg Hallman here. We are unable to provide the content provided by Professor Akinsanmi until the research findings have been published.

Bukky Akinsanmi Oyedeji is a licensed architect and Assistant Professor of Strategy at the McCombs School of Business, University of Texas at Austin. She earned her PhD in Strategic Management and Entrepreneurship at the Wisconsin School of Business, University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her research examines the conditions under which firms may attain a superior market position through human assets given their uniquely transient and agentic nature. She focuses on the role of complementary firm resources in moderating the value created by a firm’s human capital and explores these effects within the contexts of employee mobility and employee entrepreneurship. She draws on her professional background as an architect to understand how spatial configurational characteristics play a role in these relationships.

Greg Hallman teaches finance and real estate courses in the Finance Department at the McCombs school of Business at University of Texas at Austin since 2002. Dr. Hallman’s teaching focuses on real estate investment and he is the Director of McCombs Real Estate Investment Fund. The student real estate investment fund manages a public and private portfolio of real estate investments, including investments in public REIT securities and private equity real estate investments. Dr. Hallman has a B.S. in Chemistry from the University of Virginia, an MBA from Tulane University, and a PhD in Finance from University of Texas at Austin.

Please note: Alumni Network webinars must be viewed live to receive CPE credit. Watching the recording does not qualify for CPE credit.

A Market Update with Sandy Leeds (Jan. 12, 2022)

In this fast-moving webinar, Sandy Leeds discusses current events in the market such as the economy, the stock market, international issues, inflation, interest rates, the labor market, the Fed, and fiscal policy.

Some interesting topics Sandy touches upon include the relationship between the new Omicron variant and rise in household income, subdued spending, increase in personal consumption expenditures, etc. He delves into some current rates such as the 3% job quit rate per month, the 3.9% unemployment rate,  and 4.7% increase in wages. If you want to stay up to date and learn more about the reasonings behind these rates, watch the recording here!

Sandy Leeds is a distinguished senior lecturer in the Finance Department at McCombs and recently finished a thirteen year term as president of The MBA Investment Fund, L.L.C. He teaches both graduate and undergraduate level courses, including Corporate Finance, Advanced Corporate Finance, Public Policy (Long-Term Issues in the Markets), Investments, Portfolio Management / Security Analysis, Money and Capital Markets, and Macroeconomics.

Please note: Alumni Network webinars must be viewed live to receive CPE credit. Watching the recording does not qualify for CPE credit.

In this webinar, Maria De-Arteaga discusses how machine learning (ML) is increasingly being used to support decision-making in many organizational settings. However, the problem occurs in the fact that there is a gap between ML algorithms’ design, evaluation, and the functional role of these algorithms as tools for decision support. In simpler terms, it’s essentially the gap between the predictions humans make versus ML-informed decisions. View the recording!

The first part of the presentation focuses on the role of humans-in-the-loop, and the importance of evaluating decisions instead of predictions, through a study of the adoption of a risk assessment tool in child maltreatment hotline screenings.

The second part of the talk focuses on the gap between the construct of interest and the proxy that the algorithm optimizes for. Using a proposed machine learning methodology that extracts knowledge from experts’ historical decisions, we show the following that in the context of child maltreatment hotline screenings:

(1) there are high-risk cases whose risk is considered by the experts but not wholly captured in the target labels used to train a deployed model

(2) we can bridge this gap if we purposefully design with this goal in mind.

Maria De-Arteaga is an assistant professor at the Information, Risk and Operation Management (IROM) Department at the University of Texas at Austin, where she is also a core faculty member in the Machine Learning Laboratory. She holds a joint PhD in Machine Learning and Public Policy and a M.Sc. in Machine Learning, both from Carnegie Mellon University, and a B.Sc. in Mathematics from Universidad Nacional de Colombia. Her research focuses on the risks and opportunities of using machine learning to support experts’ decisions in high-stakes settings. Her work has been featured by UN Women and Global Pulse, and has received best paper awards at NAACL’19 and Data for Policy’16, and research awards from Google and Microsoft Research.

Dr. Sebastian Hohenberg showed listeners the monumental shift that has happened in the marketing field that he and his colleagues discovered in their research.  The most successful marketers of the past few years were less focused on their customers than they were on building relationships across ecosystems and carefully considering their products’ end user — even if that wasn’t their direct customer.

Sebastian presented and discussed the groundbreaking academic research conclusions with a focus on the value of Marketing Excellence initiatives. Specifically, he focused on three questions:

1. What is Marketing Excellence?
2. (When) Do Marketing Excellent initiatives pay off?
3. What are the components that payoff?

Watch the presentation here and you can see Sebastian’s slides here.

Please note: Alumni Network webinars must be viewed live to receive CPE credit. Watching the recording does not qualify for CPE credit.