Featured Sessions

KEYNOTE #1

Teaching Decision Sciences in the Age of AI: From Optimization to Structured Judgement
Dr. Bertie Greer, Dean, UMASS Lowell

Dean Greer will discuss the following:

• If analytic execution is increasingly automated, what becomes the distinctive contribution of decision sciences?
• How does AI shift the relative scarcity in decision-making—from computation to judgment?
• How can we prepare students not to compete with AI, but to define its objectives, interrogate its outputs, and govern its deployment responsibly?
• What are the implications for curriculum design and the future intellectual identity of the field?

Biography

Dr. Bertie Greer is Professor of Operations Management and the Rist Family Endowed Dean of the Manning School of Business at UMass Lowell. A nationally recognized scholar in operations and supply chain management, her research has appeared in leading journals including Journal of Operations Management, Journal of Supply Chain Management, and Journal of Business Logistics, earning multiple Best Paper Awards from major academic associations.

Throughout her career, Dr. Greer has worked at the intersection of strategy, operations, and technology, with a focus on how organizations design systems that drive performance and long-term impact. As an academic leader, she has guided institutions through strategic transformation, AACSB accreditation, and cross-disciplinary innovation initiatives.

Before entering academia, she held engineering and managerial roles at Ford Motor Company, Chrysler/Jeep, and Timken Roller Bearing, experience that continues to shape her perspective on the integration of analytics, technology, and human judgment.

Dr. Greer is a strong advocate for interdisciplinary collaboration and for redefining business education to prepare leaders to operate responsibly in an era increasingly shaped by artificial intelligence and intelligent systems.

Taking place online Wednesday, May 27 

KEYNOTE #2

AI’s Impact in Industries and the Future of Human Skills
Ramtin Davanlou, CTO for the Accenture – Intel partnership

Davanlou will discuss how organizations are translating advances in AI into practical business applications, how industry leaders are approaching responsible AI deployment, and what these shifts mean for the human skills that will matter most in the years ahead.

Biography
As the CTO for the Accenture–Intel partnership, Ramtin helps guide the development of global offerings within Accenture’s Center for Advanced AI. His work is focused on creating growth through innovation, translating cutting-edge research into pragmatic solutions that help organizations build, deploy, and scale artificial intelligence.

He believes in a deeply collaborative approach, working closely with ecosystem partners such as Intel, NVIDIA, Databricks, CSPs, etc. to shape optimized AI solutions and provide end-to-end technology architecture recommendations. By connecting strategy to execution, he helps clients across industries modernize their data foundations and operationalize AI responsibly, enabling them to realize measurable business outcomes at speed.

Taking place online Thursday, May 28 at 12 noon central time