Joel Sokol, associate professor in the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering (ISyE), has been selected to attend the National Academy of Engineering’s (NAE) 2011 Frontiers of Engineering Education Symposium.  The NAE provides the opportunity for the country’s most engaging engineering educators to share their innovations and network with other colleagues.  The symposium is to be held November 13-16 at the National Academies’ Beckman Center in Irvine, California.

One of Sokol’s more prominent innovations in the ISyE department include Project TeamBuilder, a modified version of open-source online dating software that assists Senior Design students in finding a team that has compatible goals and work ethic.  In the three years the system has been implemented, the number of teams self-reporting significant conflict has been cut in half.  Sokol’s overall success with the TeamBuilder project earned him Georgia Tech’s highest award for innovative education technology, the Class of 1934 Outstanding Innovative Use of Education Technology Award.

Though the symposium selects candidates from a sizable pool of applicants based largely on innovation in the classroom, Sokol has made significant contributions to operations research ranging from manufacturing operations to sports modeling.  Sokol also helped develop the Logistic Regression Markov Chain (LRMC), a computer ranking system featured in the New York Times that utilizes a variety of data to predict winning teams in the NCAA basketball March Madness tournament.