# Initiatives
Our projects have received acclaim in the MIT 50k competition and various commercial arenas. The tools we have developed can be applied in a wide variety of industries including finance, supply-chain management, heathcare, biomedicine, and insurance.
# Professional Services Outsourcing Initiative
Analysis of Strategic, Economic, Technical, and Organizational Aspects
15.967 Special Seminar in International Management - Offshoring
The objective of the course is to make students aware of Economical, Technological, Managerial and Organizational aspects associated with offshoring of knowledge-based professional services. The course will achieve this through case discussions of different delivery models (captive center, joint venture, 3rd party), value addition models (low-end, mid-range, high-end), and the impact of business and policy environments to each of these models.
# Datamining Initiative
Appearing in Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery
The total inventory level of the concerned medical distribution organization could be decreased from over a billion dollars to about half-a-billion dollars (reduction by 50 percent) using the method developed by the group.
One of the main requirements for agile organizations is the development of information systems for effective linkages with their suppliers, customers, and other channel partners involved in transportation, distribution, warehousing and maintenance. Agility increasingly depends on the quality of decision-making and companies are continuously trying to improve the quality of decisions by learning from past transactions and decisions. An efficient inventory management system based on contemporary information systems is a first step in this direction.
The group was able to use neural networks to optimize the inventory in a large medical distribution. The project uncovered the inventory patterns by discovering an appropriate method of constructing and choosing a neural network to solve the problem. As an extension to the neural network models, statistical procedures and assumptions were used to augment the neural network model.
With the large number of neural network classes, it is difficult to identify a particular class and model which offers the best inventory model. The group used an elaborate scheme based on traditional statistical techniques to evaluate the best neural network type.
# Internet2
If the aircraft industry had evolved as spectacularly as the information technology industry over the past 25 years, a Boeing 777 would cost $500 today, and it would circle the globe in 20 minutes on 20 litres of fuel. One of the stated goals of Internet 2 is to be able to transmit the entire Encyclopedia Britannica in under a second. Such vast communications power will dramatically alter all segments of the economy, ranging from education to healthcare, and from finance to manufacturing.
Just as the industrial revolution created a new world order of leaders (developed nations) and followers (developing countries), the informational revolution presents a new set of challenges and opportunities.
At MIT, researchers focused on the centralized model for computation; then on local computing; and now back again on large regional and national systems. For goods to be competitively priced, the supply chain needs to be streamlined, which involves emerging technologies like neural networks and data mining. And to improve the efficiency of many sectors, the dependence on paper media has to be gradually dispensed with. All these must be visualized within the framework of an overarching vision.
# Winbank Check Processing
The project, headed by Dr. Amar Gupta, focuses on developing Intelligent Character Recognition technology for automating recognition of handwritten numerals on bank checks.
This system is divided into three stages: preprocessing, recognition, and postprocessing.
A typical bank check contains several components (e.g. name and address, date, handwritten legal amount, etc.) One of the most important components is the courtesy amount block (CAB) containing the dollar amount of the check. For each check, a scanner generates a pixel image of the courtesy amount block. The image then undergoes preprocessing.