Arafath Hossain, M.S. ’18, presented his research paper “Question Break Down Structure (QBS) for Complete Business Storytelling by Agile Teams” in November at the Data Sciences 2108 Annual Meeting in Chicago. Professor Borinara Park was his faculty advisor on the paper.
Hossain researched the usage of visual data analysis in current business practice. In the present scenario of visual data analysis, there is an absence of a formal framework that can measure the completeness of an analysis. With the introduction of agile techniques in the management process, this situation has become more complex.
Under this strategy, employees are grouped into smaller units and asked to come up with solutions based on their understanding of the available data. While this approach provides insights from different perspectives reflecting the versatility of human pattern recognition, there is no formal procedure to measure the completeness of these analyses either individually or collectively. Question Breakdown Structure (QBS) is a proposed framework that provides a way to visualize the entirety of a problem space and help calculate the completeness of an analysis as well as provide a future direction for further investigation.
“The conference gave me the opportunity to connect with people working in different areas of data science. I had after-presentation discussions with other presenters about our research areas, which gave me ideas about areas that we can explore as an extension of our research,” Hossain said.
The Data Sciences 2018 Annual meeting keynote speech was about the current practices and challenges in big data analytics. A major part of the discussion was about the emergence of real-time data and the demand for big data analytics on the real-time data. The speech also covered the importance of data model interpretability and communication skill of a data scientist to make any data science endeavor successful in the business world.
Following three years working in market research and telecommunication, Hossain came to Illinois State University to earn an MBA and a simultaneous master’s in quality management and analytics in the Technology Department. As a technology graduate student, he was a data analyst intern in the Enterprise Data and Analytics Department at Illinois State University. Hossain recently accepted a job as a strategic data manager at Clemson University.
