Turner Business

Recent posts to Turner Business have highlighted the many impressive professional careers of graduates of the Turner College’s master’s degree program in organizational leadership (MSOL).   Continued examination of graduation data regarding this relatively new program reveals that it has become a gateway to further higher education.   This feature of the data goes back to the early origins of the MSOL program with Cortney Laughlin Wilson , who earned the MSOL degree in 2012 and is now a candidate for a doctorate in education from the Mary Frances Early College of Education at the University of Georgia.   Cortney is currently the director of CSU’s servant leadership program, and holder of CSU’s Frank D. Brown Distinguished Chair in Servant Leadership.   She previously earned a bachelor’s degree from CSU.   Becca Jones , an assistant professor of marketing in the Turner College who earned an MSOL degree from the Turner College in 2013, went on to earn a doctorate...

A new study by Yesem Kurt Peker , an associate professor in CSU’s TSYS School of Computer Science, and Jarel Hearst , a senior student in the TSYS School majoring in game design, explores the use of blockchain with Internet of Things (IoT) devices to provide visitor authentication and access control in a physical environment.   Their approach, developed with Frederick Stock of the University of Massachusetts – Lowell and Alfredo Perez of the University of Nebraska – Omaha, proposes the use of a “bracelet” based on a low-cost NodeMCU IoT platform that broadcasts visitor location information and cannot be removed without alerting a management system. The study, which appears in the current issue of Cryptography , not only presents the design of their system, it also provides tests of its implementation.   As they report, the results support the feasibility of implementing a physical access control system based on blockchain technology, given its superior performance compared to ...

A new study by the TSYS School’s Yi Zhou and colleagues from both Jinan University (China) and Auburn University proposes a new scheme to boost the performance of NAND flash-based solid state devices.   As they explain, garbage collection (GC) plays a pivotal role in the performance of 3D NAND flash memory, where “copy back,” which is an operation where data are read from one location and copied to another location, has been widely used to accelerate valid page migration during garbage collection.   Unfortunately, copy back is constrained by a parity symmetry issue such that data read from an odd/even page must be written to an odd/even page.   After migrating two odd/even consecutive pages, a free page between the two migrated pages will be wasted.   These wasted pages noticeably lower free space on flash memory and cause extra garbage collections, thereby degrading solid state device performance.   To address this problem, the study by Zhou and colleagues, wh...

Columbus State University held its 124 th Commencement ceremonies on December 9, 2022, and the Turner College of Business conferred 59 graduate degrees and certificates along with 142 undergraduate degrees and certificates.   Among the graduate degrees conferred, 12 were MBA degrees and 30 were M.S. degrees in organizational leadership.   Another 12 of the Turner College’s graduate degrees were M.S. degrees in applied computer science, while the remaining five graduate degrees and certificates were awarded to students in cybersecurity management.   Among the undergraduate degrees and certificates, 37 were BBA degrees in general business.   The areas of accounting, finance, management, management information systems and marketing accounted, respectively, for another nine, 10, 13, six and 17 BBA degrees conferred.   The TSYS School of Computer Science conferred 25 B.S. degrees, including, respectively, 18 in computer science and seven in information technology. ...

The Turner College’s newest team member is marketing intern Mary Alderman .   Set to graduate from CSU in the spring of 2023, Mary holds part-time employment as a sales associate at Dear Stella Boutique in Columbus.  Mary, a marketing major in the Turner College, replaces  Grace Davin , who graduates from CSU this month, in this role.             

A team of faculty from the TSYS School of Computer Science has recently been awarded a $350,000 contract by the Washington D.C.-based non-profit NGO U.S. Ignite Inc. to develop prototype solutions for two systems at Fort Benning as a part of the Smart Installations Community Dashboard (SICD) project.   This is a pilot project under the Installations of the Future (IoTF) program being managed on behalf of the Assistant Secretary of the Army, Installations, Energy, and Environment.   The TSYS School faculty team involved in this project includes Shamim Khan (project lead), Riduan Abid , Yesem Peker and Suk Jin Lee .   In addition to these faculty researchers, the team will also include a group of undergraduate and graduate research assistants.   The team will be responsible for developing a real-time remote surveillance system based on machine learning to monitor the movement of civilians, soldiers, animals, and vehicles in real time across remote locations at Fort B...

Turner College alum Ally Kerr was recently named Sports Information Director at CSU.   Kerr has served two years as a graduate assistant in the Sports Information Department, during which time she directly assisted the previous director with all athletic communications duties, including website and social media maintenance, content creation and graphic design, game day operations, reporting and writing articles, statistics, email communication, marketing, and taking photos and videos.   Additionally, she created and managed the Student-Athlete Spotlight video series in 2021 and helped coordinate the social media timeline and content for the 2022 Girls in The Game luncheon with Jennie Finch.   “Ally is a talented young professional that is ready for this exciting opportunity,” said Todd Reeser, Director of Athletics at CSU.   “She brings a strong hands-on knowledge of our current operation, has a vision for enhancing the recognition and promotion of our outstand...

In a new study set to appear in a forthcoming issue of the Journal of International Technology and Information Management , Turner College assistant professor of management information systems Yoon Lee and his colleague Riyaz Sikora of the University of Texas – Arlington explain that the surge in COVID-19 infections during the early stages of the pandemic precluded access to needed intensive care treatment by many high-risk patients.  To better deal with limited availability of ICU resources, public health officials called for the development of mathematical models for predicting the demand for ICU resources as a way of improving organizational management.  While prior models predicting future medical events, including COVID-19-related symptom changes, focused on long-term horizons (more than 15 days), Lee and Sikora proposed the first method of predicting the likelihood of COVID-19 inpatients’ admission to the ICU within a time frame of 12 hours.  Tests of their model a...

A number of Turner College faculty were recently informed by the College’s awards committee that they have earned nominations for a 2023 CSU Faculty Award .  Among these is assistant professor of economics Fady Mansour (PhD, Middle Tennessee State University), who was nominated for the 2023 CSU Faculty Research and Scholarship Award.  Mansour’s research portfolio includes publications in several top journals, including Applied Economics and Empirical Economics .  His primary research focus has been health economics.  Within this sub-field, Mansour has examined the impacts of automatic enrollment and “grandfathering” under the Affordable Care Act on health insurance take-up rates.  These studies appear in the Journal of Insurance Issues and the Journal of Economics and Finance .  Lastly, his research in labor economics focuses on the importance of employment during adolescence and the relationship between economic insecurity and fertility.  His work...