Columbia U students lose sleep for American College Cricket !
- a “sleep-deprived” quartet of Columbia University MS students : Steve Melanson,James Comfort, Vasileos Bouras & Kalpeh Patel
In September 2011, a team of engineering graduate students from Columbia University approached American College Cricket with an idea. The budding engineers wanted to use their quantitative skills to build models for American College Cricket that could possibly optimize operations.
The impetus for this proposal stemmed from a Columbia Engineering Class they were taking called, “Studies in Operations Research.” The course, which is co-taught by Dr.Lucius Riccio and Dr. Peter Norden asks students to team up with real world companies, and assist in solving or improving real challenges using operations research methodologies.
The group was led by Kalpesh Patel and included fellow MS candidates James Comfort,Vasileos Bouras and Steve Melanson.
Kalpesh first met American College Cricket founder Lloyd Jodah in October 2008 when Lloyd was just about to launch American College Cricket.
Kalpesh became in effect the first “American College Cricketer”, putting together a team at University of Miami to compete in the first American College Cricket Spring Break Championship, and like many college students around the country believed in the vision of the organization and wanted to continue to play a role.
The Columbia University group worked incessantly over the past 3 months,examining historical data, and built linear programming, probability and financial models to complete their mission – which included optimization of national rankings and tournament scheduling, and computation of a fair valuation of American College Cricket.
The results were disclosed at a Presentation at Columbia University on Nov 30, Dr Lucius Riccio, Dr Peter Norden, Lloyd Jodah and Columbia University Masters’ students were present.
In his remarks, American College Cricket President Lloyd Jodah said, “Kalpesh is an alum of American College Cricket, otherwise I might not have agreed to this project. Like many of our students, he wanted to continue to play a role in what we are accomplishing, whilst doing valuable work for his Masters.
The results are as good as I expected, and will be utilised by us. The group – Steve, Vasileos, James and Kalpesh did a wonderful job.”
