Margrét Vilborg Bjarnadóttir is an associate professor of management science and statistics in the DO&IT department. Bjarnadóttir graduated from MIT's Operations Research Center in 2008, defending her thesis titled "Data-Driven Approach to Health Care, Application Using Claims Data". Bjarnadóttir specializes in operations research methods using large scale data. Her work spans applications ranging from analyzing nation-wide cross-ownership patterns and systemic risk in finance to drug surveillance and practice patterns in health care. She has consulted with both health care start-ups on risk modeling using health care data as well as governmental agencies such as a central bank on data-driven fraud detection algorithms.
New research from Maryland Smith’s Margrét Bjarnadóttir that asks how organizations can leverage AI to build a more equitable workforce has been named the Best White Paper in the 2021 Wharton Analytics Conference.
SMITH BRAIN TRUST – Can we partner with artificial intelligence and machine learning tools to build a more equitable workforce? New research from Maryland Smith’s Margrét Bjarnadóttir may offer a way.
SMITH BRAIN TRUST – Imagine a world where your Amazon Alexa checks on you to make sure you’ve taken your medication and alerts your provider with clinically important information.
Maryland Smith’s S. Raghu Raghavan is the principal investigator for a five-year National Science Foundation collaborative research award worth nearly $1 million to look into drug cartels: Discovery, Analysis, and Disruption of Illicit Narcotic Supply Networks. As transnational drug cartels continue to grow in size and scope, their trafficking networks have become more complex and fragmented. This project takes a multidisciplinary, scientific approach to build better insight and optimization of U.S. counternarcotics efforts. The researchers will refine analytic methods to develop an understanding of the network structure and models of the flow of cocaine. The research will support the disruption strategies of anti-narcotics and other law enforcement agencies.
SMITH BRAIN TRUST – Data science and machine learning are revolutionizing organizations, businesses, even private lives – and not all of the changes are good ones. “The voices that caution about the potential pitfalls of machine learning, including bias and unequal share in the benefits, are growing louder, says Maryland Smith’s Margrét Bjarnadóttir. “And this is especially important in healthcare.”
SMITH BRAIN TRUST – Women still only earn 80 cents for every dollar a man makes.
Maryland Smith researchers will conduct data-driven research into treating a condition associated with opioid addiction as part of a joint, UMD cross-campus initiative with the University of Maryland, Baltimore.
SMITH BRAIN TRUST – The coronavirus pandemic is having an impact across industries, sectors and cultures, and prompting people around the world to pose questions and seek answers.
How can we reduce gender bias in the workplace? The question sparked a thoughtful debate at the Girls in Tech Conference in Washington, D.C., on Feb. 27.
Offering insights in the discussion were two professors from the University of Maryland’s Robert H. Smith School of Business, Wendy W. Moe and Margrét Bjarnadóttir.
Equal pay for equal work. It’s a simple notion, but one that’s surprisingly hard to implement without buy-in from upper management and quantitative tools for decision support.
