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By Huseyin Topaloglu

Cornell Tech announces the Master of Engineering program in Operations Research and Information Engineering (ORIE), which will welcome its first class of students in Fall 2016. The program is designed to create decision-makers who can provide business intelligence for a fast-paced, data-driven tech world. Applications for the program are being accepted now.

Businesses in technology-driven industries face the challenge of making decisions at rapid speeds under a huge amount of information that keeps constantly pouring in, and under unpredictably-changing conditions.

Consider the retail giant Amazon. The company sells millions of different products, receives hundreds of orders every second, operates tens of warehouses to serve orders and individualizes the shopping experience of each single customer arriving at its web portal. Based on past demand patterns and competitor responses, Amazon must decide what prices to charge, and when and how to replenish the inventories for each of its millions of products. For every single order, it must decide in real time which warehouse to use to supply each item in the order. The tastes and purchase history of every customer arriving at Amazon web portal must be taken into consideration to make product recommendations.

Many other companies, including Apple, Google, Lyft and Netflix, face similar situations that require them to make decisions at massive scale and at rapid speeds. Making such decisions clearly defies human capabilities. Systems need to take in the huge amount of available data, figure out what is relevant and what is not, use the data to understand how the environment is likely to evolve in the future, create algorithms to make decisions, and monitor the system’s response to decisions.

The goal of the ORIE Master of Engineering program is to create experts who can use computational tools, algorithms, and large amounts of data to make business decisions in uncertain environments. The program uniformly places emphasis on the fundamental theory that drives the development of algorithms, computational tools that allow large-scale implementation, and business insight that turns algorithmic decisions into verifiable outcomes.

The core structures of the program and the elective courses are designed with an eye towards technology-driven industries. A hands-on project-based curriculum is an integral part of the program.

Like all programs at Cornell Tech, the ORIE Master of Engineering program aims to impart an entrepreneurial mindset, and graduates will find startups, as well as established companies, as natural homes.

Get more information about the program here.

Huseyin Topaloglu is a Professor of Operations Research and Information Engineering at Cornell Tech and Cornell University.