Management Professor Receives Women of Innovation Honor

Teresa Piliouras, Polytechnic Institute of NYU adjunct professor of management information systems, was honored as a finalist in the Connecticut Technology Council’s sixth annual Women of Innovation awards on January 20 in the category of Entrepreneurial Innovation and Leadership. She was among fifty-nine women innovators, role models, and leaders in the technology, science, and engineering fields from across Connecticut who were recognized.
 
According to Piliouras, founder and president of Albright Associates, “This recognition reflects the growing importance of our company’s mission to protect and safeguard individual privacy in a digital age while providing tools to collect, exchange, and analyze critical information.”

Piliouras is focused on ways to protect children on the Internet and to promote public health. She is partnering with organizations in “at-risk” communities in Westchester, New York to promote health and wellness, and decrease preventable diseases, such as addiction, diabetes, and obesity. This involves creating social media campaigns designed and implemented by youth to engage their peers in healthy lifestyle behaviors. These efforts are supported by secure, confidential wiki-webs. The wiki-webs use patent-pending netSafeID technology, which collects anonymous data needed for program evaluation and assessment of long-term health outcomes.

Piliouras says, “This award was made possible by support from the NYU-Poly Hawthorne Center for Emerging Technology (CET), and the dedication and hard work of computer science graduate students Sunil Thunuguntla, Vipul Bharakhada, Nidhi Chitalia, Pradhan Nag, and Yashesh Shah. CET builds partnerships between academia and businesses that translate into the development of real jobs and jobs skills for students. This is one of the great benefits of a NYU-Poly education.”
 
Piliouras’s educational background includes a BS (biology/chemistry) from the University of Illinois, a MBA (information technology) from Iona College, and a PhD (operations research/industrial engineering) from Polytechnic University. She has authored numerous scholarly books and publications, including "Network Design: Management and Technical Perspectives, 2nd Edition" and "CRC Press Handbook of Modern Telecommunications." Most recently, she co-authored a paper with Andres Fortino, associate provost and dean of the Westchester Graduate Center, and graduate students Michael Andonov and Housheng Huang for the IEEE 2010 Long Island Systems, Applications, and Technology Conference in May. The paper is titled “Methodology to Assist Physicians in the Selection of Electronic Health Records Software.”
 
Piliouras has worked in the information technology industry for over 20 years. Many of her professional accomplishments have been pioneering artificial intelligence technologies. Prior to Albright Associates, Piliouras was founder of TCR, Inc., a consulting company specializing in data mining and artificial intelligence technologies. She also held executive and technical positions in information technology at Accenture, Pitney Bowes, Boehringer Ingelheim, and PepsiCo. She has also held appointments as professor of computer science at Iona College.