Alumni

Arik Senderovich is an Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Information (University of Toronto). He holds a PhD in Data Science (2017), an MSc degree in Statistics (2012) and a BSc degree in Industrial Engineering and Management (2006): all three degrees from the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology. Before his appointment at the Faculty of Information, he received the Lyon Sachs scholarship (awarded to one PhD grad per year) and worked as a postdoctoral fellow in the Toronto Intelligent Decision Engineering Laboratory (TIDEL) at the University of Toronto.

Arik’s research focuses lies on the intersection between Operations Research, Data Science, and Artificial Intelligence.  Currently, he focuses on developing methodologies for automatically learning models of complex and congested environments (such as hospitals and public transportation systems) from data logs. His research has recently received an acknowledgement at the Fifteenth International Conference on Business Process Management in Barcelona (2017) where he was awarded with both the inaugural best dissertation award and the best paper award for that year.

Arik has been proudly affiliated with the SEELab throughout his MSc and PhD studies. He was the primary point-of-contact with several of the lab’s partners throughout the years. The data that is gathered, managed, analyzed and maintained in the SEELab appears in all of his research papers and scientific contributions. The unique education and training that Arik received in the lab (in Statistics, Software Engineering, and Queueing Theory) has played a crucial role in his career development (in both teaching and research). To this day, he considers himself to be a member of the SEE family.

Visit Arik Senderovich’s website >

Nitzan Carmeli (Yuviler) received her BSc in Industrial Engineering and Management from the Technion in 2008. In 2010, while living a year in China, Nitzan was hosted by the IE Department at Tsinghua University in Beijing: the goal of her visit was to introduce to faculty members and graduate students, via lectures and workshops, the programs and data of the Technion SEE Center. Nitzan holds an MSc in Operation Research (OR), and recently completed her PhD in OR at the Technion (2020). Nitzan’s research focuses on service and healthcare operations, including performance analysis, prediction, and optimization via data-driven queueing models and stochastic processes.

Daniel Altman completed his Ph.D. at the Industrial Engineering and Management Faculty at the Technion. He has a B.A in Psychology Sociology and Anthropology from the Max Stern Yezreel Valley College and an MSc in Organizational Psychology from the Technion. His MSc thesis, advised by Prof. Anat Rafaeli and Dr. Galit Yom-Tov, explored the effects of expressed customer emotion in service systems on consequent employee performance and behaviour using Big-Data.

Shelly Ashtar holds an PhD at the Industrial Engineering and Management Faculty at the Technion, jointly supervised by Prof. Anat Rafaeli and Prof. Galit B. Yom-Tov. In her dissertation, she examines the effects of emotion dynamics within an interaction on multiple participants in service interactions. Shelly has an MSc in Behavioral and Management Sciences- Organizational Psychology from the Technion, and a BA in Psychology, Cognition and Neuroscience, from Ben-Gurion University of the Negev.

Monika Westphal holds an Ph.D. in Behavioral Science at the Technion, advised by Prof. Anat Rafaeli and Prof. Galit B. Yom-Tov.

Her research focuses on service operations and takes an interdisciplinary perspective. In her dissertation, Monika tackles the question of how service organizations can and should make various unclear, hidden, or not yet known processes transparent to their stakeholders. The goal is to increase stakeholders’ understanding about the processes they go through, in a way that both the stakeholders and the organization benefit.

Monika has a B.A. in Business Administration with Tourism and Hospitality Management, from the Dual State University Ravensburg, Germany. In 2015, Monika joined the SEE-Lab team, and in 2017 she completed her M.Sc. in Behavioral Sciences at the Technion under the supervision of Prof. Anat Rafaeli and Dr. Galit B. Yom-Tov.

Antonio Castellanos completed his PhD in Industrial Engineering at the Technion advised by Prof. Galit Yom-Tov.

 My research develops methods for improving the operations of contact centers under information uncertainty. By data exploration, I have identified that such uncertainty results from people’s behavior in these platforms. The main problem that stems from those uncertainties is that companies hugely overestimate their service quality. For example, in one of our datasets the company believes 7.5% of its customers abandon, whereas in reality it is above 20%.

I am currently addressing the following problems: recognizing silent abandonment of customers and its operational implications, modeling service communication and unknown customer satisfaction. To solve these problems, I combine methods of operations research, statistics, and psychology.

If companies, through my research, are better able to measure performance, they will be able to improve the service quality and efficiency, and quickly identify an unsatisfied customer. This translates into wasting less of a customer’s valuable time. On the other hand, companies benefit too. If companies’ operations are more efficient, they waste less resource and save money.