Özden Gür Ali

Özden Gür Ali is an associate professor at the Koç University Business School. She works on predictive analytics in business, particularly automatic retail forecasting in the presence of promotions, customer relationship management and healthcare.

Prior to academia, she has ten years of global R&D and management consulting experience with General Electric and ZS Associates , serving Fortune 100 companies and pharma industry with data driven analytics in marketing, sales, productivity and Six Sigma quality.

Her current research focuses on causality with predictive analytics /machine learning.

• Forthcoming paper at IJF shows that regularization induced confounding reduces accuracy of retail forecasts with promotions, and introduces the automatic interpretable retail forecasting (FAIR) method to forecast with promotions.
• Hierarchical Bayes framework to infer the impact of behaviors on disease burden using local observational data while guiding the model to be in line with qualitative global findings

Her work has appeared in journals such as Operations Research, EJOR, IEEE Tr. Neural Networks, Intl J Forecasting, Expert Systems w Appl., and in conferences such as KDD and ICDM, resulted in multiple patents and has been implemented in various industries including retail, heatlthcare and manufacturing.

Teaching Big Data and Data Analytics and Management Science courses in undergraduate, MBA and executive ed programs. Consulting engagements in pharma, retail, banking. Özden served as the Associate Dean of College of Administrative Sciences and Economics department at Koç University from 2014 to 2017.

Özden holds a B.S. in Industrial Engineering from Boğaziçi University, and M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Decision Sciences and Engineering Systems.

AWARDS

• The Golden Offer project with YKB Private Banking received the Private Asset Management Innovation Award 2014 in Innovation
• The Store Sales Forecast Modeling project resulted in the first technology transfer of Koc University (2013)
• Received the Chris Voss Highly Commended Award at the EurOMA 2007 Conference for the paper Profit Maximizing Pharmacy Decision and Pharmacy Discounts in Turkey with my student Burak Çavdaroğlu
• Received Doçent title from Türkish higher education council (YÖK) - 2007
• GE R&D Whitney Award for Guiding GE Plastics Six Sigma Initiative
• Ruth and Dale Karger Best Thesis Award for Ph.D.
• Rensselaer Research and Teaching Assistantship for M.S. and Ph.D.
• Turk Egitim Vakfi Scholarship for Graduate Studies
• Vehbi Koc Vakfi Scholarship for 8th Place in University Entrance Examination