Dr. Maheshwari, who teaches data mining at MUM, says that Consciousness-Based Education develops students’ total potential from within—the total potential of their brain physiology—while they are learning skills to be great technicians.

IBM selects MUM to participate in Academic Initiative program
by Maharishi University of Management, Fairfield, Iowa, USA, Achievements
January 2014

IBM has recently selected Maharishi University of Management (MUM) to participate in their Academic Initiative program which helps teach students market-ready skills by providing free data-mining software and courseware, access to hardware, and training for university faculty.

An immediate benefit of the program is a free campus-wide site license for their data-mining software called SPSS Modeler, the leading statistics and data analytics program in the industry.

In a recent course titled “Business Intelligence and Data Mining” students from the management and computer science departments brought together their skills to analyze and interpret data using the software.

“Data is doubling every 12 to 18 months,” said faculty member Anil Maheshwari, who taught the course on data mining. “Companies need to understand all that data and respond to it meaningfully and in real time. They need people who can figure out what the patterns are.”

According to Dr. Maheshwari, who oversaw the application process for the Academic Initiative program, analyzing the big data made available today by the confluence of powerful servers, ubiquitous networks, and massive databases had become a crucial technical skill.

“The value of this whole area of data mining is to be able to develop that intelligence for holistic understanding of your business, your customers, your product, your services,” said Dr. Maheshwari. “By looking to your own company’s data, or merging with outside data, you can get a fuller view of the environment that you are operating in, understand your customers, and be able to serve them better.”

The software will also be used by PhD students in their research and to teach statistics. The University can also make use of it for the statistical analysis facet of any empirical research conducted on campus. As part of the IBM initiative, MUM faculty and students have also received valuable training from IBM consultants/trainers to help strengthen their skills with the IBM SPSS Modeler system.

“MUM is the world’s pioneer of Consciousness Based education,” Dr. Maheshwari said. “This means that, in addition to giving students knowledge and skills, we are developing students’ total potential from within—the total potential of their brain physiology. If all we do is just train students on the tools, people can become great technicians of the tools without having the context and wholeness of why they are using the tools and what problem are they trying to solve.”

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