IU Kelley School alumnus and former U.S. ambassador to be appointed by President Biden to National Security Education Board

Posted on March 28, 2024 by George Vlahakis

Editor’s note: On March 22, 2024, President Joe Biden announced his intent to appoint Indiana University Kelley School of Business alumnus M. Osman Siddique as one of 14 members of the National Security Education Board, which provides strategic guidance and oversight for the National Security Education Program.

The National Security Education Program administers multiple fellowships and awards, including the David L. Boren Scholarships and Fellowships with the aim of increasing the national capacity to understand and interact effectively with foreign cultures and languages. He will be one of six presidential appointees, who include experts from non-profit organizations and academia who provide valuable assistance to the National Security Education Program.

In September of 2020, we introduced you to Siddique, through the article below, written after the publication of his memoir. In recognition of his appointment, we are resharing this story.

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BLOOMINGTON, Ind. – From escaping to an Indiana University education from a bloody civil war, to a successful business career and then representing the United States as an ambassador in the midst of violent conflict, M. Osman Siddique’s life story sounds like an engrossing page-turner.

Although his father was serving as Pakistan’s ambassador to Tanzania, he sided with his fellow Bengalis and the family fled for England.

In late summer of 1972, Siddique arrived at Indiana University Bloomington, fleeing the Bangladesh War for Independence from Pakistan. As a student at Dhaka University, he survived the “Black Night” massacre a year before, when the Pakistan army encircled the campus and killed hundreds of Bengali students, faculty and staff.

In his new memoir, “Leaps of Faith: An Immigrant’s Odyssey of Struggle, Success and Service to His Country (Transcon Publishing),” IU Kelley School of Business MBA graduate Siddique introduces readers to his family, its strong ties to IU and the business school, his entrepreneurship and what has been a remarkable American success story.

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Kelley ranks No. 1 in the Big Ten, fourth in the U.S. in management research productivity

Posted on March 26, 2024 by George Vlahakis

BLOOMINGTON, Ind. – Indiana University’s Kelley School of Business has risen into the top five among business schools in the United States in terms of management research productivity, according to an annual index compiled by Texas A&M University and the University of Georgia.

The Kelley School is ranked fourth nationally and tied for No. 1 in the Big Ten with the University of Michigan in the latest TAMUGA Ranking of Management Department Research Productivity, which tracks faculty research contributions to eight of the most-influential scholarly journals in the discipline of management.

A year ago, Kelley was ranked eighth.

The ranking gauges business schools based on the number of publications in eight top management journals by their faculty members. Research output by faculty in Kelley’s Department of Management & Entrepreneurship also was more than any other business school in Indiana.

Since 2020, the Kelley School has soared upward in these management research rankings, rising from 32nd just four years ago.

Erik Gonzalez-Mulé, the Randall L. Tobias Chair in Leadership, associate professor of organizational behavior and human resources, and chair of the department, said the rankings reflect the support for scholarly research by Kelley School leadership as well as his peers’ desire to advance management knowledge.

The department’s size has grown considerably since 2020, but management faculty at Kelley also are leveraging their broad base of expertise, which has led to more collaboration and productivity, he said. Research areas where the department particularly has recently excelled include employee selection, leadership, and stress and well-being; sustainability, entrepreneurial behavior and action and CEO behavior and strategic incentives.

Kelley professor Sagar Samtani is school’s first recipient of a CAREER Award from the National Science Foundation

Posted on March 22, 2024 by George Vlahakis

Sagar Samtani

BLOOMINGTON, Ind. – Sagar Samtani, assistant professor of operations and decision technologies at the Indiana University Kelley School of Business, is the school’s first recipient of a prestigious CAREER Award from the National Science Foundation.

The Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Program is one of the National Science Foundation‘s most prestigious awards in support of early-career faculty members who have “the potential to serve as academic role models in research and education and to lead advances in the mission of their department or organization,” according to its criteria.

Samtani, a Weimer Faculty Fellow at Kelley, is an expert on cybersecurity, artificial intelligence, the Internet of Things, dark web analytics, cyber threats, deep learning, and mental health related to technology. He directs the school’s Data Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab, or DSAIL, a multi-disciplinary research group that develops practical data and AI-enabled techniques for societally relevant applications.

Ash Soni

“In his relatively short career, Professor Samtani has proven to be a leading researcher of some of the most revolutionary advancements in technology,” said Ash Soni, dean of the Kelley School and The Sungkyunkwan Professor. “He has a sixth sense for zeroing in on potential threats in the cyber world and how they might affect different aspects of business and society. More importantly, he has a passion for sharing information and leading discussions – among students, colleagues, and industry leaders – to find practical solutions. He’s highly deserving of this award.”

The NSF CAREER Award will support a new research project at DSAIL, “An Artificial Intelligence (AI)-enabled Analytics Perspective for Developing Proactive Cyber Threat Intelligence,” with funding totaling $604,594. Samtani said the project, for which he is principal investigator, will help develop integrated AI-enabled analytics research and education around important topics in cyber threat intelligence, including modeling adversarial behaviors, vulnerability management and open-source software security.

Rebecca Slotegraaf

“Professor Samtani is zealous in not only building on emerging trends in AI but also creating new avenues to understand how AI is shifting vulnerabilities to society, organizations, and government,” said Rebecca Slotegraaf, associate dean for research and the Neal Gilliatt Chair and Professor of Marketing. “Receiving the NSF CAREER Award is a strong testament to his commitment to transforming knowledge, practice, and education.”

“I am humbled by this recognition, which reflects the tremendous support I have received since coming to the Kelley School and from my colleagues across Indiana University,” Samtani said. “The NSF CAREER Award is an extraordinarily special grant for a professor in any discipline. I am thrilled that it also reflects the opportunities available to those who are at the Kelley School.”

Samtani joined the Kelley School in 2020 and quickly established himself as a prolific and pioneering researcher on high-relevance topics and a top-tier teacher. He developed one of the nation’s first courses related to AI for cybersecurity. He has also co-founded several workshops on the topic at prevailing conferences in information systems and artificial intelligence.

He is also deeply engaged with industry, most notably through his consulting engagements and roles on the Executive Advisory Council for the CompTIA Information Sharing and Analysis Organization and the Board of Directors at the DEFCON AI Village.

Samtani has been a principal investigator or a co-PI for more than a dozen sponsored research awards totaling more than $5 million since earning his doctorate. His portfolio includes NSF support for a project that seeks to protect open-source software institutions worldwide use to collaborate and share research findings. He also is an investigator on an NSF grant being used to train the next generation of the nation’s crucial cybersecurity workforce. IU is a participating institution in NSF CyberCorps Scholarship for Service, which trains information technology professionals and security managers to meet the rapidly growing cybersecurity needs of federal, state, local, and tribal governments.

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IU Kelley School receives the Inspiring Programs in Business Award from Insight Into Diversity magazine

Posted on February 29, 2024 by George Vlahakis

The National Case Competition attracts students and corporate partners for a weekend of networking, learning and a case competition that awards more than $20,000 to winning teams.

BLOOMINGTON, Ind. – In recognition of its efforts to promote inclusion and provide career opportunities for underrepresented students, the Indiana University Bloomington Kelley School of Business has received the 2024 Inspiring Programs in Business Award from Insight Into Diversity magazine, the largest and oldest diversity and inclusion publication in higher education.

The Inspiring Programs in Business Award honors colleges and universities that encourage and assist students from underrepresented groups to enter the field of business. The Kelley School will be featured, along with 27 other award recipients, in the magazine’s April 2024 issue.

Insight Into Diversity magazine is known for its annual Insight Into Diversity Higher Education Excellence in Diversity (HEED) Award, the only award that recognizes colleges and universities for outstanding diversity and inclusion efforts across their campuses.

IU Bloomington and IU Indianapolis have received the HEED Award several times, including in 2023.

Inspiring Programs in Business Award winners were selected based on efforts to inspire and encourage a new generation of young people to consider careers in business through mentoring, teaching, research, and successful programs and initiatives.

Award spotlights the National Diversity Case Competition

Specifically, the Kelley School was honored for its efforts to establish and present the National Diversity Case Competition, which annually attracts some of the best and most diverse talent in undergraduate education from more than 30 colleges and universities nationwide to IU Bloomington each January.

“At the Kelley School, we are constantly striving for greater diversity, equity, and inclusion in business, which also is highly valued by the companies who hire our students and who invest in our programs,” said Ash Soni, the school’s dean and The Sungkyunkwan Professor. “Over the years, we’ve helped create groundbreaking initiatives and innovative programing designed to fulfill that mission.

“This recognition for the National Diversity Case Competition is nearly as important as the appreciation we hear from students at Kelley and from around the country who say they benefited from our efforts to contribute to a broader understanding of diverse cultures and experiences in the global business world,” Soni added.

Many participants leave with contacts that lead to internships and full-time offers.

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Do people worldwide care where their data are stored? Kelley research finds they don’t

Posted on February 21, 2024 by George Vlahakis

The new findings counter claims that citizens find value in imposing constraints on international data sharing.

BLOOMINGTON, Ind. – It’s become increasingly common to receive a formal letter notifying you that your personal information has been included in a data breach. Social media and other online platforms collect so much information that notion of privacy is little more than an illusion. So how do Americans and others around the world feel about limiting the sharing of their data?

New research from the Indiana University Kelley School of Business and the Technology Policy Institute set out to answer that question, surveying people in the United States, the United Kingdom, South Korea, Japan, India, Italy and France.

Jeff Prince

“As data become increasingly valuable, policymakers have debated how to oversee data privacy. A compelling dimension of this debate concerns data localization mandates – rules that require certain types of data to be stored in their country of origin,” said Jeff Prince, professor of business economics, the Harold A. Poling Chair of Strategic Management and chairperson of the Department of Business Economics and Public Policy.

Prince and his co-author, Scott Wallsten, president of the Technology Policy Institute and a senior fellow at the Georgetown Center for Business and Public Policy in Washington, D.C., carefully designed several conjoint surveys and analyzed the participants’ choices over different data sharing arrangements.

The results showed that citizens in seven highly populated countries placed little to no value in data localization requirements.

“We found, at most, only modest evidence of added value resulting from data localization,” Prince said. “To the extent that there is added value from localization, it appears to largely come for data types where privacy – full restrictions on data sharing – is already highly valued.”

Such high value data largely includes financial information, such as bank balances and biometric information.

Data localization laws can significantly impact the business practices of data-intensive firms such as Apple, Google and Microsoft.

Prince and Wallsten also found no evidence that excluding China and Russia affected the evaluation of data localization restrictions among Americans, British, Italian, Indian and French citizens.

In contrast, Japanese and South Koreans expressed a preference against excluding China and Russia if data were being shared internationally.

“Our findings have several implications. First, they suggest that the use of privacy concerns as motivation for data localization laws may be overstated, although there may be some gross welfare gains for some types of data,” Prince and Wallsten wrote. “Our findings also indicate that if international sharing is allowed, restricting prominent authoritarian countries such as China and Russia appears to have little impact on consumer value, at least for a number of highly populated countries.

They go on to conjecture on why Japanese and South Koreans may be averse to excluding China and Russia in international data sharing: “China, Japan, and South Korea comprise a significant economic bloc, so this finding could indicate a belief by Japanese and South Korean citizens that restricting data access to a major trading partner could come at a cost.”

These findings counter the claims or implications that citizens find value from imposing constraints on international data sharing. Rather, they highlight that citizens may be mindful of downsides of restricting access from trading partners. Welfare justifications for data localization laws should not rely only on assumed preferences of citizenry for such restrictions.

Nations that have enacted such laws include Kazakhstan, Russia, China and Vietnam, and France and the United States are considering them. The European Union, through its General Data Protection Regulation imposes a form of data localization, placing restrictions on exporting data outside the EU.

Prince and Wallsten are authors of the working paper under peer review, “Do People Around the World Care Where Their Data Are Stored?”

Job performance evaluations: Hidden effects from AI in an evaluator role?

Posted on February 21, 2024 by George Vlahakis

BLOOMINGTON, Ind. — Job performance evaluations can be stressful. You’ve put in your time, you’ve worked hard for the company, and now comes the analysis, one that could decide what kind of vacation you’ll be able to afford or whether you’ll go on one at all.

But, more and more, there is a question of who, or what, should be doing the evaluation to begin with: your boss or artificial intelligence.

Ashley Sauciuc

In a new paper, “Using Artificial Intelligence to Evaluate Employees: The Effects on Recruitment, Effort, and Retention,” three professors at the Indiana University Kelley School of Business sought to assess reaction to the knowledge of whom or what will be evaluating job performance.

“AI is an emerging technology that’s really being used in business — in performance evaluations — today. And we don’t really understand how people perceive the information that they’re getting from those evaluation systems” said Ashley Sauciuc, assistant professor of accounting at the Kelley School. “It’s incredibly important to understand how people are internalizing and perceiving the feedback that they’re getting from this AI technology and how that might actually affect real business decisions, since perceptions influence real action.”

In the first of two experiments, 700 participants were given a scenario in which they could leave a job for a position at another firm with $10,000 less in salary but also an opportunity to earn up to $20,000 more in performance-based bonuses. They were either told their annual review may be conducted by a senior manager or handled by an artificial intelligence system. A second experiment involved 539 participant observations and tested the interaction between evaluator type and demographic group on employee effort and retention.

Jason Brown

One of the key findings of the paper was that employees from underrepresented minority groups provided greater effort when a firm used AI instead of a traditional manager for employee evaluations. In contrast, among white males, the opposite was found to be true.

“We found effort was higher for underrepresented groups under AI versus a traditional evaluation, but we found little difference for more traditional employees,” said Jason Brown, associate professor of accounting. “So that leveling of the playing field I think was important because you’re able to let the AI give you a boost for your underrepresented employees that puts them on equal footing as your more traditionally represented employees.”

When a traditional manager is in place for evaluations, there is a gap between underrepresented minority groups and traditionally represented employees when it comes to their attraction to the company, but when AI is in place employees are equally attracted to the company, regardless of demographic group, said Joseph Burke, an assistant professor of accounting at Kelley.

Joe Burke

“How do we know that the research results reflect a greater trust in AI and not a concern of needing to overcome the failings of it? Our models tell us that the difference in employee behavior between that of traditional managers versus AI is driven by expected biases,” Burke said.

The researchers also found that, regardless of demographics, employees hold a general belief that AI is less biased.

“The general consensus among practitioners and academics is that AI systems can be more or less biased, based on the parameters in which they were set up. But we’re not really speaking to actual bias,” Burke said concerning those who think AI is biased when it comes to evaluations. “We are studying employees’ perceptions of bias. An underlying assumption in our research is that when firms do use AI, it will be implemented using best practices to minimize any sort of actual bias in their systems.”

Collectively, the paper says its results provide important cost-benefit information for firms considering the use of AI within their performance evaluation system in terms of the firm’s attractiveness to potential employees and the effort they will receive from under-represented minority groups versus more traditionally represented employees.

The researchers intend to do more in-depth field study to see if the perceptions actually result in real effort changes or real recruitment changes. Burke thinks it could be an expansion into the effects of different implementation parameters.

“Our study focused on how employees perceive and react to AI-driven performance evaluations. However, our experiment provided relatively little detail regarding the specific parameters of the AI system,” Burke said. “I think the next step is taking a deeper dive into how employee responses to AI-driven systems may depend on the specific parameters used to develop, train, and/or implement the AI system.”

Kelley professors playing an important role in international efforts to govern data use and artificial intelligence

Posted on February 21, 2024 by George Vlahakis

BLOOMINGTON, Ind. – Through their extensive and interdisciplinary research, two business law professors at the Indiana University Kelley School of Business are continuing the legacy of the late Elinor “Lin” Ostrom, who was the first woman to win the Nobel Prize in economics.

Angie Raymond

Much of Ostrom’s work focused on ways that people organized themselves to manage resources. Today, Scott Shackelford, Provost Professor and professor of business law and ethics at the Kelley School, serves as executive director of the internationally acclaimed Ostrom Workshop, which she founded with her husband Vincent. Angie Raymond, also a professor of business law and ethics, directs the Program on Data Management and Information Governance at the Ostrom Workshop.

Jointly and as individuals, Shackelford and Raymond are involved in numerous projects that focus on knowledge and data – vital resources for the 21^st Century that include everything from the protection of personal information to trade secrets — and how people use it and share it safely, including through artificial intelligence.

“Without data, there is no AI. Everyone wants all the data because they want to be smarter,” Raymond said. “The world right now is very siloed and the result of the many regulatory structures that are coming from many different places is to continue to silo that data. There are key areas in my opinion where we need to overcome the regulatory silos and let smart people share data among themselves so we can all benefit as a society.”

Raymond is involved in many collaborations on this topic. She serves as the United States’ national consultant to United Nations Commission on International Trade Law — reporting on Electronic Commerce related issues — and previously attended the UN Commission on International Trade Law Online Dispute Resolution Working Group. She is an identified expert in online dispute resolution (ODR) at Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation, where she is one of the academic leads in the Collaborative Framework project on cross-border ODR.

Scott Shackelford

Shackelford has written more than 100 articles, book chapters, essays, and op-eds for diverse publications on cyber security and governing AI. He is the author or co-author of nine books, which include, “The Internet of Things: What Everyone Needs to Know (Oxford University Press, 2020),” “Governing New Frontiers in the Information Age: Toward Cyber Peace (Cambridge University Press, 2020),” and the forthcoming “Forks in the Digital Road: Key Decisions in the History of the Internet (Oxford University Press, 2024).”

Together at Ostrom and with support from Cambridge University Press and the National Science Foundation, they are involved with creating “communities” where scholars who work with data can talk and begin creating structures that allow the exchange of information that helps everyone. They also are editing a new series about the management and governance of the “knowledge commons,” where some of this research will appear initially.

“It’s really about diagnosing problems and finding governance gaps,” added Shackelford, who also directs the Ostrom Workshop Program on Cybersecurity & Internet Governance and is executive director of IU’s Center for Applied Cybersecurity Research.

Each of them also is involved in privacy research and how it relates to so-called smart cities, which use electronic methods and sensors to collect data that is then used to manage assets, resources, and services in an urban area. Raymond also has been a consultant to the Midwest Big Data Hub. Shackelford has studied governing AI as it relates to autonomous vehicle regulation in the U.S., Europe and China.

It also was recently announced that Shackelford and Raymond are co-leads as IU’s representatives to the newly formed U.S. AI Safety Institute Consortium, from the U.S. Department of Commerce’s National Institute of Standards and Technology (Another Kelley professor, Sagar Samtani, also is a co-lead). They will help to develop science-based and empirically backed guidelines and standards for AI measurement and policy, with the goal of improving AI safety across the world.

Their other recent and current activities include:

A new book coming out later this year about the Metaverse for Oxford University Press that Shackelford wrote with Jeff Prince, professor of business economics, the Harold A. Poling Chair of Strategic Management and chairperson of the Department of Business Economics and Public Policy at Kelley. It includes a chapter on AI and the Metaverse.
Shackelford’s students in IU’s S. in Cybersecurity Risk Management will be working with the Responsible AI Team at Microsoft on a survey of state laws and regulations that are being suggested nationwide which govern AI.
This fall launching a “tech governance” visiting fellows program, through which scholars and practitioners will come to IU Bloomington and be embedded at the Ostrom Workshop and at Kelley.
Raymond served as a consultant to the National Science Foundation at a major conference about AI trustworthiness, serving on its planning committee.
Shackelford and Raymond recently co-authored an influential article, “Should We Trust a Black Box to Safeguard Human Rights? A Comparative Analysis of AI Governance,” published in the UCLA Journal of International Law and Foreign Affairs.

While Shackelford and Raymond are actively pursuing dialogue and understanding of how machine learning and resulting AI impacts our world, they also acknowledge the challenge that higher education institutions face in keeping up. But the basic pedagogical principles remain the same.

“We are giving our students the basic skill sets to make decisions as businesses need to implement technology in a broader global world,” Raymond said. “If we don’t think critically about how we are using technology, we will lose the ability to think critically about certain decisions that we still need human beings in charge of.

“Our research allows us to understand the way that human beings are using and engaging with technology, so that we can bring that into the classroom, so it doesn’t surprise the student,” she added.

If your TV spoke to you, would you buy it? Study finds people spend more on some ‘talking products’

Posted on February 20, 2024 by George Vlahakis

BLOOMINGTON, Ind. – In the classic Disney film “Beauty and the Beast,” Lumière, the candelabra character, famously sings with Mrs. Potts, a tea pot, “Be our guest, be our guest. Put our service to the test. Tie your napkin round your neck, Cherie, and we provide the rest.”

When the 1991 Oscar-nominated song co-written by Indiana University alumnus Howard Ashman was released, it hardly seemed realistic that a product could sing its own praises and sell itself to consumers. But artificial intelligence today makes it possible and new research from the IU Kelley School of Business finds that it can be a winning retail strategy.

Alan Dennis, professor of information systems and the John T. Chambers Chair of Internet Systems at the Kelley School, believes that it won’t long before products are selling themselves. Visual design technologies have rapidly improved over the past decade. Digital assistants such as Siri and Alexa and support chatbots have become ubiquitous.

Researchers used a two-minute video to deliver the “human” element of each product, including a TV.

“Companies have long used cartoon-like characters to sell products. We are familiar with the ‘M&M spokescandies,’ for example,” Dennis said. “But adding human features to a product can be a powerful way to influence consumers’ perceptions and decision making, because it can trigger anthromorphism.

“When we hear or see an inanimate object that has human features, our brain automatically ascribes human form to it even though we rationally know the object is not human. Anthromorphism changes how we think and behave toward an object, making us like it more,” he added. “Initial evidence suggests that not all products can trigger this; people are more likely to anthromorphize complex products.”

To test this idea, Dennis asked about 50 undergraduate students to assume the role of a new master’s candidate and told them their program required them to purchase a laptop computer, a camera and a television. They were required to bid for the products in an eBay-style auction site.

The researchers used a two-minute video to deliver the “human” element of each product and participants couldn’t bid until it was finished. They used a professional graphic to add human physical characteristics – such as eyes, a mouth and nose – human-like movements – such as blinking and mouth movement while talking. Each product spoke in the first person.

In addition to tracking each person’s willingness to pay, their cognitive processes were measured using an Emotiv EPOC EEG headset. (Photo courtesy of Alan Dennis).

In addition to tracking each person’s willingness to pay, their cognitive processes were measured using an Emotiv EPOC EEG headset. Findings included:

People were willing to bid about 20 percent more for the more complex product – the laptop – when it was displayed with the human attributes, as compared with those who only learned about it through a static web page or with a video presenting just a slideshow.
In contrast, displaying the less complex products – the television and camera – in the same anthromorphic way had no effect on the amount bid.
The EEG data showed that presenting a product with the human elements and features triggered more cognition in the parietal lobe of the brain, which plays a key role in our understanding of the world around us. It also helps us understand where we are in relation to other things that your senses detect around us.
This recognition within brain was not a universal response. The data showed that ascribing human characteristics to the non-human products triggered different responses, depending the complexity of the product. Many respondents exerted more effort to suppress the “cartoon agent” as irrelevant in the case of the television and the camera.
The results suggest that people are more likely to amthromophize a product if it already has some human-like functionalities, such as the ability to respond and speak in a human voice, present some level of human knowledge, or have some autonomy in how it functions.

“Our research shows that there are important boundary conditions in the effects of displaying products in an anthromorphic form,” Dennis said. “Our results show that anthromorphic displays lead to different cognition and different willingness to pay for more complex products, but not less complex products … Our results suggest that adding a face, movement and human speech are useful in designing the display of more complex products.”

The paper, “Selling myself: Anthropomorphic products in electronic commerce,” appears in the journal, Decision Support Systems,” and was co-authored by Dennis and Lingyao “Ivy” Yuan, associate professor of information systems and the Kingland Systems Graduate Director of Business Analytics at the Debbie and Jerry Ivy College of Business at Iowa State University. She earned her PhD in information systems from the Kelley School of Business.

Kelley grad to appear on ‘Shark Tank’ after Flora, his plant care tech startup, blossoms

Posted on February 15, 2024 by George Vlahakis

Aabesh De (Courtesy photo)

BLOOMINGTON, Ind. – As a freshman studying at the Indiana University Kelley School of Business, Aabesh De in 2012 watched as a then recent Kelley graduate Derek Pacqué handled the pressure of making a pitch for his company before a panel of potential investors on the ABC television show “Shark Tank.”

De, who earned a bachelor’s degree in operations management from Kelley four years later, this Friday (Feb. 16) will have his own opportunity to pursue an investment stake from the “sharks,” for Flora, a company that provides a patented, smart plant monitor and an AI-driven app that takes the guesswork out of caring for houseplants.

Viewers can see how the 2016 Kelley grad did when the show begins at 8 p.m. ET (7 p.m. CT).

“Flora started at the height of Covid. I was not a plant parent by any means before Flora,” said De, who resides in Nashville, Tenn. “I was killing every single plant in my line of sight. The last straw was when my mom gave me a rose bush plant that she had for years and years. I killed that thing in a pathetic eight days.

“I was getting frustrated, asking myself, ‘why can’t a guy like me figure out plants,” he added. “I wanted to inherit the green thumbs that my mom and Dad have.”

De said he decided to put on his “MacGyver Hat” to develop a “Fit Bit for plants.” He taught himself about electronics to develop a prototype moisture sensor and then learned how to code in IOS and ultimately also built an app that contained information unique to different kinds of plants.

Today, his Flora Pod is advertised as a “life alert for your plants.” Its patented technology sends owners real-time alerts about their plants’ health, including tips on moisture, light, humidity, temperature, and more.

His company sells other plant care products, and he sees it as a one-stop shop for all things plant care and gardening. The app, which has seen considerable traction in growing to more than 300,000 registered users in more than 190 countries since its launch in July 2021, provides a gamified, community-driven experience for taking care of your plants.

De patented the Flora Pod, a smart plant monitor, and an AI-driven app that takes the guesswork out of caring for houseplants.

He compares the app to DuoLingo, a successful tech startup that teaches languages through a similar gamified experience.

De grew Flora with initial funding support from venture capital firm Long Jump in Chicago, and from David Kalt, founder of Reverb.com, where De went to work for shortly after graduating from IU. In August of 2021, he left Microsoft to pursue Flora full-time. He also has worked with the Nashville Entrepreneurship Center and completed its 2023 Inflight Program.

“It’s been incredibly rewarding seeing how far we’ve come, especially in seeing the impact of the lessons I received from my teachings at Kelley; my Excel classes and Consulting Workshop experience and all the good days at IU have come back to help me with a lot of the day to day,” said De, whose grew up in Munster, Indiana, outside Chicago. (more…)

U.S. News ranks Kelley Direct Online MBA program No. 1 for the third straight year

Posted on February 7, 2024 by George Vlahakis

BLOOMINGTON, Ind. – For the third consecutive year, the Kelley Direct Online MBA program at the Indiana University Kelley School of Business has been named the best online MBA program in U.S. News’ 2024 Best Online MBA Program rankings.

This is the seventh time since 2013, when U.S. News began ranking online degree programs, that it has ranked Kelley Direct No. 1. This latest recognition arrives as the Kelley School marks the 25th anniversary of the program.

In addition, this year Kelley Direct received top marks in five specialty categories, including a first place for marketing and finance and second place for business analytics, general management and programs serving veterans. 

Ash Soni

“We’ve been doing this longer than any other leading business school, and we set the bar high, but what continues to make Kelley Direct a leader in online education is that we keep moving the bar higher,” said Ash Soni, dean of the Kelley School and the Sungkyunkwan Professor.

“Because everything we do is developed and delivered by our own faculty and staff, our students get a unique, personalized education that includes real-time classes and in-person immersion experiences on campus and on location around the world. Our thoughtful attention to programming is reflected in our multiple top rankings in specialty categories,” Soni added.

Created in 1999, Kelley Direct is the original online MBA program from a top-tier business school. The program is uniquely designed to meet the needs of working professionals, whose tuition dollars are reinvested into the program – not an online program manager. This empowers the program to offer its highest quality program at a lower price than top competitors.

Unlike many other online MBA programs, the Kelley Direct Online MBA is taught entirely by full-time Kelley faculty who create dynamic course content from the $10 million Jellison Studios housed within the Kelley School of Business.

Also making it distinctive are its in-person, immersive experiences, which include Kelley On Campus, that includes a live case where students apply what they’re learning in a real-world setting that also benefits a real client; and Kelley On Location, which enables students to take a deep dive into an industry, geographic region, or emerging challenge shaping today’s business landscape.

Will Geoghegan

Will Geoghegan, chair of Kelley Direct and clinical associate professor of management and entrepreneurship, noted that the No. 1 ranking not only is indicative of the program’s quality, but it also reflects the quality of its students.

“We are always looking for new ways for students to engage with one another and with our faculty and staff, as if they were here on campus, learning in person full-time,” Geoghegan said. “It’s important that our students see that they are learning with the best, in addition to learning from the best.”

In addition to the No. 1 ranking by U.S. News, Kelley also is ranked first by Fortune and Poets&Quants, which last fall ranked Kelley Direct No. 1 for the third time. In 2023, Princeton Review also named it the No. 1 program for the sixth time. QS Quacquarelli Symonds, the world’s leading provider of services, analytics and insight to the global higher education sector, ranked Kelley Direct No. 1 among all programs in the Americas.