Turner Business

Associate professor of economics, Tesa Leonce , was recently chosen to chair the Turner College’s Department of Accounting and Finance, taking over for Associate Dean, Fonda Carter , who has been serving on an interim basis.  She joined the Turner College in 2014 from her prior position on the economics faculty at Eastern Illinois University.  In 2016, Leonce and associate professor of business, John Finley , led a group of 22 Turner College students on a study abroad trip to Spain, while in 2017 she joined management professor, Neal Thomson , in leading nine Turner College students in a study abroad program in Ireland.  Leonce, who earned a doctorate in economics from the University of Wyoming, won the 2017 Turner College Faculty Service Award and currently serves on the editorial board of Compensation & Benefits Review .  Lastly, her latest research appears in Empirical Economics , Tourism Economics , Healthcare , and the International Journal of Healthcare Man...

Talisha Lockhart joined the Turner College’s administrative team in June, taking positions as the College’s Web MBA Coordinator and academic advisor.   She comes to the Turner College from Columbus Technical College, where she served as Assistant Director of Financial Aid.   Prior to her 11-year stint at CTC, Lockhart was a Resource Planning Analyst at Aflac for five years.   She earned a bachelor’s degree in finance from Alabama State University in 2004, and an MBA from Troy University in 2008.   

A Mathematical Approach to Liver Fibrosis Diagnosis Hepatitis C virus (HCV), the infectious agent causing hepatitis C, affects 170 million people worldwide, leading to more than 350,000 deaths per year.  Serial liver biopsies, which are typically used for the diagnosis of liver fibrosis progression, can be invasive, expensive, risky, and inconvenient to patients.  Fortunately for hepatitis C sufferers, a preferred diagnosis process may be on the way.  In a study appearing in a 2022 issue of Sensors , TSYS School computer scientists Anastasia Angelopoulou and Rania Hodhod , and their colleague from the CSU Department of Mathematics, Nehal Shukla, present the development, validation, and evaluation of a prediction mathematical model for non-invasive diagnosis of liver fibrosis in chronic hepatitis C virus.  Their model uses a set of nonlinear ordinary differential equations as its core and divides the population into six groups: susceptible, treatment, responder, no...

Smooth Glide or Bumpy Ride? In their 2022 article appearing in the Journal of Financial Planning , Turner College finance professor Gisung Moon and his co-authors, Doug Waggle of the University of West Florida and Hongbok Lee of Western Illinois University, point out that rising rates of inflation mean that bonds are providing negative real returns for retirees in need of safe cash flows.   Unlike prior research that assumes that bond rates and inflation will return to normal over five or 10 years, Moon’s study considers scenarios where rates return to normal over five, 10, 15, 20, 25, 30 years, or never.   The research finds that post-retirement glide path choices that would have worked in the past, such as a 20 percent-80 percent stock-bond mix and a four percent withdrawal rate over 30 years, are no longer safe investment choices in the current environment.   As Moon indicated to Turner Business , “Even with lower withdrawal rates and/or shorter retirement horizons,...

Two Turner College faculty announced their retirements at the end of the 2021-2022 academic year.   Leslie Adah , an assistant professor of accounting, joined the Turner College faculty in 2017 from his prior stints on the accounting faculties at Mississippi State University and the University of Memphis.   He earned a doctorate in business and accounting from Jackson State University.   Jong Ha , a Professor Management, joined the Turner College in 2007.   He earned a doctorate from Georgia State University and was a previous holder of the Turner College’s Rothschild Chair of Business Leadership.   Both the staff at Turner Business and the faculty and staff of the Turner College wish them both a happy retirement.

Confronting Network Congestion at the Edge As explained in research by TSYS School professor of computer science Mohamed Riduan Abid and his colleagues Salmane Douch, Khalid Zine-Dine and Driss Bouzidi of Mohammed V University, along with Driss Benhaddou of the University of Houston, increasingly stringent constraints related to bandwidth and jitter that have been imposed by novel applications (e.g., e-Health, autonomous vehicles and smart cities) are now combining with the rapidly increasing number of connected Internet of Things devices so that the core network is becoming overly congested.  To deal with this concern, edge computing is emerging as an innovative computing paradigm that leverages Cloud computing to process and cache data at the edge, thus reducing network congestion and latency.  Given this backdrop, Abid and his co-authors present, in a forthcoming issue of IEEE Access , a detailed, thorough, and well-structured assessment of edge computing and its enabling...

Molding Machine Learning for Business Among machine learning techniques, classification techniques are useful for various business applications, but classification algorithms perform poorly with imbalanced data.   In their study appearing in a 2022 issue of Information Systems Frontiers , Turner College assistant professor of management information systems Yoon Lee and Chris Bang of Auburn University – Montgomery propose a classification technique with improved binary classification performance on both the minority and majority classes of imbalanced structured data.   Their technique involves three steps, including creation of a balanced training set via under-sampling and converting it into an image depicting a line graph.   The third and final step in the process includes training a Convolutional Neural Network, which is a Deep Learning algorithm that can absorb an input image, assign importance to various objects in the image, and differentiate one from the other, u...