Graduate Admissions

From Algorithms to Impact: AI in Action Across Business

Join us for the Business + AI Faculty Lecture Series, a special opportunity to explore how artificial intelligence is reshaping the future of business across industries and disciplines. Featuring Stevens School of Business faculty, this series will highlight emerging ideas, practical applications, and timely conversations at the intersection of business, technology, ethics, finance, entrepreneurship, and data.

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Select a topic from above or scroll down to explore each lecture and learn more about what to expect.

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Attendees who participate in at least four of the six lectures will receive a LinkedIn badge recognizing their engagement in the Business + AI Faculty Lecture Series.

Managing AI Technologies: AI-in-the-Loop, AI-on-the-Loop, Human-out-of-the-Loop?

Dr. Michael zur Muehlen | Associate Dean of Graduate Studies and Associate Professor

April 9 • 9:00 am - 10:00 am (eastern)

This lecture introduces a practical framework for understanding three AI deployment postures: AI-in-the-loop, where AI makes operational decisions like fraud scoring or loan underwriting; AI-on-the-loop, where AI monitors process telemetry and detects drift across thousands of cases; and human-out-of-the-loop, where autonomous agents act independently — raising hard questions about accountability and the point at which augmentation quietly becomes automation. Drawing on cases from manufacturing, healthcare, financial services, and the evolving world of AI agents, the lecture examines the guardrails, escalation paths, and oversight architectures that managers need to build around these systems.

Michael’s career spans academia, industry consulting, and executive education. He has advised organizations including the U.S. Department of Defense, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, and the Federal Reserve Bank of New York on the design and governance of AI-enabled processes and decision models, as well as data-driven operating models. At Stevens, he is actively involved in developing applied AI curricula and interdisciplinary initiatives that connect research, education, and real-world impact.

Responsible AI: Foundations of Ethics and Algorithmic Fairness

Dr. Violet Chen | Assistant Professor

APRIL 16 • 9:00 AM - 10:00 AM (EASTERN)

This lecture introduces the AI ethics landscape, examining how principles of fairness, transparency, privacy, and accountability apply in real-world business decisions. We will focus specifically on algorithmic fairness, a well-established field in machine learning and optimization that has gained renewed urgency in the current era of artificial intelligence, as the rise of Generative AI and autonomous agents introduces new complexities in how we define and pursue equity. We will discuss the taxonomy of fairness, the lifecycle of fair AI-supported decision-making, and emerging equity challenges. The lecture concludes by framing responsible AI not as a constraint, but as a strategic prerequisite for sustainable business success.

Violet Chen is an Assistant Professor in the School of Business at Stevens Institute of Technology whose research focuses on fairness and ethical AI. Her specific areas include equity in allocation, algorithmic fairness, and moral judgment modeling, with applications in urban mobility, infrastructure, supply chains, and healthcare. She earned her Ph.D. in Operations Research from Carnegie Mellon University and holds a B.S. in Applied Mathematics and Business Administration from Georgia Tech. She received the best paper award at CPAIOR 2024.

AI in Finance: Rewiring Robo-Advising for the Autonomous Portfolio

Dr. Zachary Feinstein | Associate Professor and Co-Director of PhD Programs

APRIL 23 • 9:00 AM - 10:00 AM (EASTERN)

While early "robo-advisors" brought basic automation to retail investing, the next generation of financial engineering is poised to completely rebuild the underlying engine. This lecture explores the transition toward truly autonomous wealth management by bridging artificial intelligence with decentralized market structures. We will dive into how advanced AI can dynamically evaluate investor risk aversion, moving beyond static questionnaires to establish and continuously adapt portfolio guidelines. For AI agents to seamlessly manage these customized strategies, the assets themselves must be digitally native. Tokenization provides this essential digitial representation, allowing algorithms to directly read and interact with financial instruments. Finally, we will examine how decentralized market technologies can serve as the execution layer, functioning as natively self-rebalancing portfolios that eliminate the friction of traditional active management. Ultimately, this session will highlight how combining intelligent risk modeling with digital assets is paving the way for a more frictionless financial future.

Zachary Feinstein is an Associate Professor and Co-Director of PhD Programs in the School of Business at Stevens Institute of Technology. His research focuses on financial contagion and systemic risk, along with decentralized finance, financial technology, machine learning, and game theory. With a Ph.D. from Princeton University in Operations Research and Financial Engineering, he has published extensively in top-tier journals including Operations Research and the SIAM Journal on Financial Mathematics, establishing himself as a leading scholar in financial networks and risk analysis.

AI Entrepreneurship: Bootstrapping Autonomous Robotaxi Services

Dr. Jordan Suchow | Assistant Professor

APRIL 30 • 9:00 AM - 10:00 AM (EASTERN)

Robotaxi services are being rolled out across the nation, and soon the world, after nearly 20 years of active R&D in the space. This lecture looks at a key strategic decision that companies in the autonomous navigation space have all wrestled with: how to bootstrap a product when the data needed to train the system requires deploying it. We'll look at how different companies have solved this bootstrapping problem and look towards other industries where this same pattern has arisen.

Jordan Suchow is an Assistant Professor in the School of Business at Stevens Institute of Technology, where his research examines how AI and computational infrastructure can transform experimentation, decision-making, and research organizations. He created Stevens' Management of AI Technologies course and has consulted for startups on AI strategy and product development. His research has been funded by DARPA and NSF, has appeared in venues including Nature, PNAS, and NeurIPS, and has produced two U.S. patents and three museum installations. Before coming to Stevens, he earned his Ph.D. from Harvard University and was a postdoc and research scientist at UC Berkeley.

Data: The Next Frontier

Dr. Aleksi Aaltonen | Associate Professor

May 7 • 9:00 AM - 10:00 AM (EASTERN)

Data are the key resource in the digital, AI-driven economy. In this talk, I explore what data are (or is) and why their importance is going to grow in the future. I will discuss emerging trends and issues that organizations will need to tackle with respect to data.

Aleksi Aaltonen is an Associate Professor of Information Systems at the School of Business, Stevens Institute of Technology. His career spans industry and academia, where he currently focuses on data as the key resource in the age of AI. Before joining academia, Aleksi designed digital services for organizations such Nokia and CMI – Martti Ahtisaari Peace Foundation founded by Nobel Peace Laureate and former President of Finland Martti Ahtisaari. After completing his PhD at the London School of Economics and Political Science, Aleksi cofounded and helped to raise 1.7 million euros funding for an activity tracking app Moves that was acquired by Facebook in April 2014. Aleksi currently serves as a member of the Research Advisory Council at Numeris, a Deputy Editor-in-Chief at the Journal of Information Technology, and he also maintains the Data Studies Bibliography that is a resource for management scholars studying data.

Delivering Value with AI: Business Model Transformation

Dr. Katia Meggiorin | Assistant Professor

MAY 14 • 9:00 AM - 10:00 AM (EASTERN)

This lecture explores how AI is rewriting the rules of competition. I will first introduce the foundational 9-Block Business Model Canvas to break down the core components of successful organizations. We will then put this theory into practice by analyzing two rival companies in the same industry—one traditional, and one heavily AI-driven. Finally, we’ll compare their frameworks side-by-side to reveal exactly how artificial intelligence transforms a company's entire blueprint for success.

Katia Meggiorin is an Assistant Professor of Information Systems in the School of Business at Stevens Institute of Technology. Her research examines regulatory uncertainty's impact on digital platform markets, particularly the sharing economy including Airbnb, Uber, and Kiva. She analyzes societal trade-offs of these platforms, user misconduct drivers, and how platform governance intersects with market dynamics and regulatory environments. She earned her Ph.D. from NYU Stern School of Business and holds master's degrees from New York University and IE Business School.

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