Michael Watson

About

Michael Watson is an Associate Professor of Instruction at Northwestern University, affiliated with the Industrial Engineering and Management Sciences department. He has been teaching at Northwestern as an adjunct since 1999 and joined the faculty full-time in 2023. His career has been centered on implementing ideas from industrial engineering, management, and machine learning for Fortune 500 companies through software, consulting, and start-up ventures. Watson co-founded and served as CEO of Opex Analytics, an AI company specializing in data science and optimization, which was sold to LLamasoft and subsequently to Coupa. Prior to his full-time academic appointment, he worked extensively in industry, applying his expertise in supply chain analytics, network design, and operations optimization. His research interests include AI frameworks and business applications, supply chain analytics with a focus on network design, optimization, and operations. Watson has authored books on supply chain network design and managerial analytics and maintains a blog titled 'Mike Talks AI.' He is committed to bringing his industry experience into the classroom to benefit students, offering insights into careers in software, consulting, and Fortune 500 companies, as well as start-ups. Additionally, he works to maintain strong connections between Northwestern's industrial engineering programs and industry partners, contributing to projects that optimize hospital scheduling, court system biases,…

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Artificial Intelligence
• Physics
• Mathematical analysis
• Chemistry
• Statistics
• Econometrics
• Mathematics
• Biochemistry

Selected publications

• Indigenising Water

  Third Text · 2022-05-03 · 2 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  This article unpacks the stakes of Rebecca Belmore’s Fountain, a video installation that represented Canada at the 2005 Venice Biennale. The artwork consisted of a video installation based on a performance she gave in Vancouver. The work engaged water from a perspective informed by the artist’s Indigenous identity and heritage, framing water as a site of struggle and violence in a manner informed by settler colonialism on Turtle Island but in a way that resonates with crisis of global water ineq…

  PublisherDOI

• Spatial Correlation Robust Inference

  arXiv (Cornell University) · 2021-02-18 · 1 citations

  preprintOpen accessSenior author

  We propose a method for constructing confidence intervals that account for many forms of spatial correlation. The interval has the familiar `estimator plus and minus a standard error times a critical value' form, but we propose new methods for constructing the standard error and the critical value. The standard error is constructed using population principal components from a given `worst-case' spatial covariance model. The critical value is chosen to ensure coverage in a benchmark parametric mo…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Trend, seasonal, and sectorial inflation in the Euro Area

  RePEc: Research Papers in Economics · 2020-01-01 · 1 citations

  articleSenior author

  A central focus of monetary policy is the underlying rate of inflation that might be expected to prevail over a horizon of one or two years. Because inflation is estimated from noisy data, the estimation of this underlying rate of inflation, which we refer to as trend inflation, requires statistical methods to extract the inflation “signal” from the noise. The task of measuring trend inflation is further complicated by the large seasonal fluctuations in many prices, so that attempts to estimate…

• Turbulence in Two-Dimensional Relativistic Hydrodynamic Systems with a Lattice Boltzmann Model

  arXiv (Cornell University) · 2022-05-10

  preprintOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Using a Lattice Boltzmann hydrodynamic computational modeler to simulate relativistic fluid systems we explore turbulence in two-dimensional relativistic flows. We first a give a pedagogical description of the phenomenon of turbulence and its characteristics in a two-dimensional system. The classical Lattice Boltzmann Method and its extension to relativistic fluid systems is then described. The model is tested against a system incorporating a random stirring force in k-space and then applied to…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Spatial Correlation Robust Inference in Linear Regression and Panel Models

  Figshare · 2022-01-01

  datasetOpen accessSenior author

  We consider inference about a scalar coefficient in a linear regression with spatially correlated errors. Recent suggestions for more robust inference require stationarity of both regressors and dependent variables for their large sample validity. This rules out many empirically relevant applications, such as difference-in-difference designs. We develop a robustified version of the SCPC method of Müller and Watson (2022a) that addresses this challenge. We find that the method has good size prope…

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• James H. Stock

  Harvard University

  315 shared

• John G. Fernald

  University of Groningen

  67 shared

• Robert E. Hall

  67 shared

• Ricardo Reis

  52 shared

• Robert G. King

  Boston University

  34 shared

• Ulrich K. Müller

  24 shared

• Andrew T. Foerster

  20 shared

• Pierre-Daniel G. Sarte

  Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond

  17 shared

Similar researchers at Northwestern University

• Tobin J. Marksh-176
• Joseph Hupph-171
• James D Thomash-160