Victoria Hill has been asked to be a speaker on a panel entitled “Engaging Youth in Green Innovation” at SXSW Eco, a conference being held in Austin, Texas, October 6-9, 2013. SXSW Eco hosts an international audience of thought leaders and decision-makers working towards a sustainable and prosperous future to solve the complex challenges facing civil society, the economy and the natural world. The platform provides cross-sector opportunities for discussion on critical matters towards actionable and profitable solutions. Read more...

Victoria Hill is a member of a team of nine experts that will be participating in this year’s George C. Marshall visit to Austria Program. The subject for this year’s visit is “Advanced Manufacturing / Access to Innovation, Securing the Talent Pipeline.” The program was established in 2007 by the Austrian government to recognize the assistance Austria received from the US after World War II. Every year, the program brings to Austria a group of decision makers from the US Congress and administration, various federal and state-level agencies, as well as think tanks and industry associations to highlight Austrian innovations in industry and technology. More information on this year’s visit is available here.

Tayo Fabusuyi chaired the Economics, Markets, and Networks Session at the INSNA Annual Conference in Hamburg, Germany. He also made a presentation on a novel approach for studying the structure of an economy using a combination of Network and Input–Output Analysis. The methodology employs input-output multipliers for the visualization of economies and for the computation of a set of network metrics which identify the inter-relationships among industries within the economy. A copy of the presentation is available here.

Tayo Fabusuyi presented a practice ready paper at the Jan meeting of the TRB in Washington D.C. The paper, co-wrote with Victoria Hill and Robert Hampshire documents the framework utilized for both the formative and summative evaluation of a smart parking application that provides real time information on parking availability. The contributions of the approach are the insights it provides on how the key challenges created by the unique environment within which the system was deployed were addressed. In addition, the framework was employed in tackling response shift bias through the use of a binary system approach that uniquely identifies distinct cohorts of respondents. Read more...

Tayo Fabusuyi and David Devlin – Foltz of Aspen Institute led a small group discussion titled “Towards a Consensus on Nomenclature and Standards on Advocacy Evaluation.” The brown bag session examined advocacy challenges and makes the case for some structure robust enough to capture the complexity inherent in the process.Read more...

Tayo Fabusuyi and Victoria Hill contributed a blog entry on using a mixed method approach for evaluating a year-long program in Western Pennsylvania for high-school aged African American males. The framework employed was an open systems one in which three interrelated forms of behavioral changes were examined using two forms of inquiry. The approach allowed the evaluation team probe beyond program outputs to a more comprehensive assessment that takes into consideration the broader influences that often affect program outcomes of this nature. The evaluation strategy also naturally lends itself to data triangulation an attribute that helped reduce the risk of incorrect interpretations and strengthen the validity of the conclusions reached. Read more...

Tayo Fabusuyi co-wrote an invited article with Robert Hampshire of the Heinz College, Carnegie Mellon University on “Predictive Parking App” that was featured in the February 2012 issue of the “The Parking Professional”, the official magazine of the International Parking Institute.

Tayo Fabusuyi called for the establishment of a community of practice for the advocacy evaluation field, where evaluators working on advocacy and policy change evaluations can share with and learn from one another. He argued that one of the hallmarks of a nascent field, of which advocacy evaluation is one, is the absence of consensus on nomenclature and standards that most stakeholders subscribe to. It thus becomes imperative to foster a community of practice to aid in exchanging knowledge and in creating a body of work that addresses this deficit. Read more...

A demonstration of the pilot project on parking availability within Pittsburgh’s Cultural District was showcased at the 18th ITS World Conference in Orlando Florida. The deliberation centered on the project’s unique characteristics that include the collaborative efforts of funders, academia, nonprofit and for-profit entities that were involved in the project, the environment in which the product was deployed and the richness of the data from which the prediction model and the robust evaluation strategy drew upon. Preliminary results from the evaluation and next steps to be taken for a full project implementation were also discussed.Read more...

Tayo Fabusuyi presented an analytics project that integrates uncertainty into the strategy formulation process at the Palisade Risk Conference in Amsterdam. The approach, applied to a manufacturing firm, combines both MCDM with Monte Carlo simulation with the objective of developing a strategic production plan that will achieve the best use of existing facilities while providing information on the possible expansion of the firm’s productive capacities. Through this approach, Numeritics was able to deliver a strategic plan that not only performs well across a broad spectrum of possibilities but is also nimble enough to respond quickly to unexpected events and contingencies.Read more...

Numeritics presented a funded study on “Responding to Demographic Shifts within the Greater Pittsburgh Nonprofit Sector” at the 2010 US Census LED partnership workshop in Arlington VA. The study was commissioned to assist nonprofit organizations in greater Pittsburgh better anticipate and respond to future workforce and talent shortages. This objective was achieved by utilizing both secondary data from the US Census Quarterly Workforce Indicators and primary data obtained from a survey administered to nonprofit organizations in the greater Pittsburgh area. The study concluded that the present high participation rate observed for the cohort of employees 45 years or older may not be sustainable in the long term given the rapidly aging demographic profile and that in the very short term, there may be a more than proportionate increase in demand for talent within the nonprofit as sector's funders recover and demand for services remains high given the current recession. Read more...

Numeritics was one of the recipients of the 2010 applied research grant from The Forbes Funds. The research titled “Health of the Nonprofit Labor Market in Allegheny County, PA” utilized a demand and supply approach to the analysis of the labor market. The research revealed a potential leadership shortage in the region’s nonprofit sector, particularly within Health Care and Social Assistance agencies resulting from both a growing demand and a shrinking supply of qualified workers. This is further compounded by the aging character of the sector’s workforce especially at the upper echelon and the absence, for most of the organizations surveyed, of a robust succession plan. Read more...