Happy New Year from GoPeaks

I wish you and your family a very happy, healthy, safe, and prosperous New Year of 2022. I also hope to take this opportunity to review the breakthroughs at GoPeaks Initiative over the last year and introduce some exciting things to look forward to in the coming year.

GoPeaks was created in late 2018 by Professor Victor Chen at UNC-Charlotte as an informally organized digital lab. It began as a group of researchers Professor Chen led at UNC-Charlotte, UNC-Chapel Hill, and Duke University, and incrementally expanded to other institutions globally in both academia and the industry. 

Funded through a hybrid model of grants, gifts, and research commercialization, GoPeaks is a collection of research and technology development to accelerate and scale knowledge synthesis into real-world decision solutions. Its ultimate goal is to build a shared world brain serving the broad interests of people and society.

2021 marks a big year for GoPeaks with significant breakthroughs in research, technology, community development, and commercialization.

In 2021, GoPeaks team was focused on developing high-performance machine reading and synthesis, and knowledge representation tools. Several prototypes of software solutions were developed, including:

• CausTator 1.0 - Free annotation software for dummies
• Machine Reading and Synthesis
• Knowledge Graph-based DAGs
• EMIE - Free UI Platform for Visualizing Relations

New Year Resolutions

• Funded by the Institute of Management Accountants and National Science Foundation, a team is developing machine-reading and synthesis software to automatically extract and organize multi-stakeholder insights from unstructured textual data into a causal knowledge graph
  

The Knowledge Integration, Synthesis, and Engineering (KnISE) community is formed in response to the growing fragmentation of knowledge in business research. KnISE seeks to become a catalyst for knowledge accumulation and integration on a timely basis and at a massive scale into ready-to-use decision solutions.

Free to join LinkedIn Professional Group and the Academy of Management Connect@AOM Working Group

KnISE launched its YouTube channel, with two playlists

• Founders' Ideas
• Seminars and Thought Leaders: first speakers include McGill Professor Henry Mintzberg, former Singapore Management University B-School Dean Howard Thomas, and former IMD President Peter Lorange among others

GoPeaks Founder Professor Victor Chen organized two knowledge synthesis symposia:

• 2021 Academy of Management Symposium on Curating Collective Wisdom
  
• 2021 INFORMS Session on Knowledge Graph and Machine Reading for Knowledge Synthesis
  

New Year Resolutions:

• KnISE is proposing its inaugural meeting at the 2022 Academy of Management Annual Meeting in Seattle, WA

• A very exciting project in 2022 is to build on eXpert Knowledge Exchange Platform (XKEP) and create a web-based knowledge exchange platform, where fragmented expertise is synthesized into a unified knowledgebase with a query system, connected with a virtual community of experts and users.

Multistakeholder Agency: Stakeholder Benefit Alignment and National Institutional Contexts

Knowledge Synthesis for Scientific Management: Practical Integration for Complexity Versus Scientific Fragmentation for Simplicity

Grand Synthesis: Unifying the Fragmented Science of Business for All Stakeholders

Blog post "Grant Synthesis" was featured as Editor's Top Picks on Towards Data Science.

New Year Resolutions:

• Multistakeholder benefit alignment: A meta-analytic review, revise and resubmit at Business and Society
  
• Stakeholder management approach and financial performance in COVID crisis, to be submitted
• Ownership structures and multistakeholder relations, data collected
• A project on causal data science and multistakeholder governance has received a seed grant for 2022-2023 from Copenhagen Business School

Knowledge graph embeddings-based explainable artificial intelligence for enterprise performance management was awarded the National Science Foundation (NSF) Innovation Corps 2021 Grant and voted by cohort participants as #2 People’s Choice

• In 2021, we have interviewed over 150 practitioners in enterprise performance management (EPM), representing leading software vendors, end-users, and consultants on their thoughts on the current EPM landscape, future market and demands, and the most desirable solutions. See a full report here.

GoPeaks's proposal to develop an Expertise Management, Integration, and Exchange (EMIE) platform that can synthesize expertise into causal graph-based analytics tools has made the finalist in the following pitch contests:

• 2021 Knowledge Graph Conference Pitch Contest
• 2021 Innovate Charlotte Ignite Grant Contest

Knowledge Graph-Based Reasoning Artificial Intelligence Network (KG-BRAIN): A Commercial Demonstration for Healthcare System Performance Management (Password: KG-BRAIN)

• In collaboration with Premier Inc and RevTech Labs, and supported by Microsoft, IBM, Dell, Atrium Health, the IMA, among others, KG-BRAIN seeks to provide a novel solution for explainable prescriptive analytics that draws collective intelligence of experts to optimize healthcare system enterprise performance management (EPM) decisions.
• It has received a seed grant from UNC Charlotte, and a proposal is currently under review for NSF PFI Grant

• Through UNC Charlotte's Global Tech Launch (GTL) courses, GoPeaks founder Professor Victor Chen builds on his know-how of research commercialization to help high-tech ventures assess and optimize their global Go-to-Market (GTM) strategy. 
• This year also saw the formation of the first program team with Dr. Victor Chen, Dr. Joe Hoff, and Dr. Yongling Gorke, and the program advisory board with Shawn Hoyer (Bank of America), LJ Stambuk (WACC), Eileen Cai (CRBA), and Devin Collins (Ventureprise).
• During 2021 spring and fall cohorts, high-tech teams and startups including Siemens Energy's Horizon Digital Studio, Margik, Prohuman Technologies, Ecoclosure LLC, and BatteryXChange teamed up with business students from UNC Charlotte Belk College of Business and 8 international universities in 5 countries to explore GTM opportunities abroad.
• The GTL program raised approximately $50,000 gifts (including in-kind) from the community in 2021.

New Year Resolutions

• GTL will continue observing the success of the high-tech participants in their execution of global GTM strategies, and provide advisory services if needed.
• UNC Charlotte's Office of International Program has received funding from the Institute of International Education (IIE) to help the GTL program engage new partners from Egypt.

GoPeaks Research Team Updates:

Invited by Microsoft, GoPeaks founder Dr. Victor Chen has joined some 20 faculty nationwide to form the inaugural Advisory Board for Microsoft Azure for Research Community.

I-Corps researcher Dr. Nasheen Nur has joined Florida Institute of Technology as an Assistant Professor in Computer Science.

I-Corps researcher Dr. Ali Karduni has joined Northwestern University as a Postdoctoral Scholar in Computer Science and Psychology.

Research intern Sunil Kumar Narasimhan joined Lakeview Analytics as a Data Scientist.

Research assistant Punit Mashruwala will join Amazon as a Software Engineer.

Research assistant Sreekar Nedunuri will join Goldman Sachs as a Software Engineer.

Research assistant Bharadwaj Tirunagaru joined Credit Suisse as a Software Developer.

Visiting researcher  Evan Canfield joined Allstate as a Data Scientist.

Visiting researcher Felipe Montano Campos started his PhD study in health economics and outcome research at the University of Washington - Seattle.

Global Tech Launch Updates:

Global Tech Launch program advisor Shawn Hoyer was promoted to Managing Director and Head of Venture Capitals at Bank of America Merrill Lynch.

German team member Marc Reichel of the Spring 2021 Global Tech Launch team for Prohuman Technologies joined McKinsey & Co as a Full-time Fellow.

Industry Engagement Updates:

GoPeaks welcomed industry advisor Gary Cokins, former Executive-in-Resident of the Institute of Management Accountants and advisor to IMF, and a 40-year veteran in enterprise performance management and analytics, with a prominent career at SAS, Deloitte, etc.