Dr. Sean Warnick
Dr. Sean Warnick has collaborated with faculty from BYU's Mathematics and Statistics departments to create the Information and Decision Algorithm Laboratories, or IDeA Labs. The IDeA Labs focus on the application of algorithmic decision processes to better understand methods for making decisions from data and encouraging students to pursue their individual interests in combination with a mathematical background, creating a unique research practice.
The program consists of four application-specific laboratories as thematic centers for research arising from various disciplines. The labs include Computational Biology and Environmental Systems Lab (CBES), Computational Economics and Financial Systems Lab (CEFS), Operations Research and Engineered Systems Lab (ORES), and Policy Sciences and Human Systems Lab (PSHS). The expectation is that virtually any student interest can find a natural home in at least one of the lab settings. The laboratories house research projects, invite collaborations, facilitate interaction with other research groups, and encourage partnerships with industry.
One aspect of IDeA Labs that makes it a unique educational experience for students is the intimate relationship with industry. Student researchers operate as "Industry Externs," developing theoretical and computational tools relevant to the challenges faced by the IDeA Labs' industry partners. The group sharpens its collective expertise on real problems from a variety of contexts. Students graduate ready to tackle the next generation of science and industry's most pressing problems.
In collaboration with the BYU Bookstore, the CEFS Lab developed a particularly unique test bed for its methods. The Bookstore yielded an unprecedented degree of pricing and promotional authority to scientists at the CEFS Lab. The lab, in response, is developing structured procedures for executing marketing and merchandising decisions which ensure that the effectiveness or failure of a proposed decision can be experimentally verified in a scientifically sound manner. From a scientific point of view, these structural procedures enable meaningful controlled experimentation; from a business perspective, these procedures ensure that return on investment (ROI) calculations consider the feedback dynamics intrinsic to retail. As a result, the Bookstore can operate as a functioning prototype of a retail laboratory, explicitly testing its marketing and merchandising ideas as they execute to quickly distinguish best practices from less profitable activities.
In the IDeA Labs, industrial partners bring cutting-edge problems into the labs. While working to solve these true-to-life problems, students learn how to abstract away the peculiarities of a specific business problem and generalize them into an interesting computational problem. The students are able to address business problems, thus satisfying their industrial partners, while working on an abstract decision problem that gives them a chance to publish and prepare for graduate school and the industry.
The IDeA Labs have also forged relationships with academic entities as well. In 2007, Russ Howes, a student researching in the Labs under Dr. Warnick, participated in a research exchange with Cambridge University. Howes spent five weeks working with Cambridge University's Control Group, one of the world's premier research groups in control systems. His work there explored network reconstruction algorithms for biological systems. These procedures allow biologists to design the experiments needed to understand the complex mesh of protein signaling pathways in a cellular system. Howe's time in England opened up a partnership with Cambridge. In Fall 2007, a PhD student at Cambridge came to Utah and spent several weeks researching with the IDeA Labs at BYU. Howe's research, which was funded by a variety of sources, including the National Science Foundation and various industrial partners, will make it possible for further academic collaborations to occur.