Glenn Shafer
Dean, Business School | Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey
Newark, NJ, UNITED STATES
Catalyzing new directions in executive education
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Biography
Glenn Shafer has been Dean of the Rutgers Business School – Newark and New Brunswick since January 2011. In his nearly three years as Dean, he has overseen a large expansion of the School’s undergraduate programs on both campuses and launched new programs at the master’s level in marketing research, supply chain management, financial analysis, and business analytics. The School has strengthened its mentoring programs for undergraduates, it career placement services at both the undergraduate and graduate levels, and its programs for serving all of New Jersey’s students, including women and under-represented minorities.
Dean Shafer has strengthened the School’s connections with the business community, with a new center for real estate, a new small business office for Middlesex County, and new initiatives in executive education. He has raised the stature of the Rutgers Business School by expanding support for faculty research. He has positioned the School to be a leader within Rutgers in developing the private-public partnerships and community involvement championed by Rutgers President Robert Barchi and incoming Rutgers-Newark Chancellor Nancy Cantor.
Dean Shafer has been a university educator for 40 years. He completed his Ph.D. in mathematical statistics at Princeton University in 1973. As a scholar, he is best known for his work in the 1970s and 1980s on the Dempster-Shafer theory, an alternative theory of probability that has been applied widely in engineering and artificial intelligence. There is now an entire society devoted to the advancement of this theory, the Belief Functions and Applications Society, which has been holding international conferences since 2010. He is also known for his initiation, with Vladimir Vovk, of the game-theoretic framework for probability. They are now preparing a second edition of their book on the topic, Probability and Finance: It’s Only a Game! The third international workshop on game-theoretic probability was held in Tokyo in 2012. In 2009, Dean Shafer was recognized for his work on these topics with an honorary doctorate in economics by the University of Economics, Prague.
Industry Expertise (5)
Education/Learning
Business Services
Financial Services
Research
Training and Development
Areas of Expertise (9)
Probability
Dempster-Shafer Theory
Game-Theoretic Frameworks
Higher Education Administration
Strategic Planning
Program Development
Corporate Communications
Executive Education
Statistics
Accomplishments (2)
Mentor Award (professional)
1987-01-01
Awarded by the University of Kansas Business School Doctoral Students Association, 1986, 1992
G. Bailey Price Award (professional)
1983-01-01
Awarded in recognition of outanding teaching in graduate mathematics by the University of Kansas, Department of Mathematics
Education (2)
Princeton University: A.B., Mathematics 1968
Princeton University: Ph.D., Statistics 1973
Dissertation: "Allocations of Probability: A Theory of Partial Belief"
Affiliations (10)
- International Journal of Approximate Reasoning : Advisory Board
- International Journal of Intelligent Systems : Advisory Board
- Electronic Journal for History of Probability and Statistics : Editorial Board
- Statistical Science : Associate Editor
- American Accounting Association
- American Association for Artificial Intelligence
- American Statistical Association
- Bacheiler Finance Society
- History of Science Society
- Institute for Mathematical Statistics
Media Appearances (1)
Industry Support Fuels Professor's Ambitions of Building World-Class Center for Real Estate Studies at Rutgers
Rutgers Today online
2014-09-30
Glenn Shafer, the dean of Rutgers Business School, said the Paul Profeta Chair revives a real estate program that Rutgers lost in the 1980’s with the retirement of Richard Marshall, a popular MBA professor. During his comments, Shafer touted some of the ways Rutgers Business School stands out among others in the Big 10, from its size to its success at finding employment for MBA students post-graduation. “We’re hoping the real estate center gives us some additional bragging rights in just a few years,” he said...
Articles (5)
Perspectives on the theory and practice of belief functions
International Journal of Approximate Reasoning
1990-01-01
The theory of belief functions is a generalization of the Bayesian theory of subjective probability judgement. The author's 1976 book, A Mathematical Theory of Evidence, is still a standard reference for this theory, but it is concerned primarily with ...
Probability propagation
Annals of Mathematics and Artificial Intelligence
1990-01-01
In this paper we give a simple account of local computation of marginal probabilities when the joint probability distribution is given in factored form and the sets of variables involved in the factors form a hypertree. Previous expositions of such local computation ...
Probability judgment in artificial intelligence and expert systems
Statistical Science
1987-01-01
Historically, the study of artificial intelligence has emphasized symbolic rather than numerical computation. In recent years, however, the practical needs of expert systems have led to an interest in the use of numbers to encode partial confidence. There has been ...
Implementing Dempster's rule for hierarchical evidence
Artificial Intelligence
1987-01-01
This article gives an algorithm for the exact implementation of Dempster's rule in the case of hierarchical evidence. This algorithm is computationally efficient, and it makes the approximation suggested by Gordon and Shortliffe unnecessary. The algorithm itself is ...
Languages and Designs for Probability Judgment*
Cognitive Science
1985-01-01
The weighing of evidence may be viewed as a mental experiment in which the human mind is used to assess probability much as a pan balance is used to measure weight. As in the measurement of physical quantities, the design of the experiment affects the quality of the ...