We, UMass INFORMS Student Chaper, came up with a fantastic idea and initiated Youtube Interview Series with the speakers coming to give talk in our Speaker’s Series. We are glad to share our Youtube Channel with you! Please check out the following link to see our interviews with various Professors including Prof. James Orlin, Dr. Reneta Konrad and Dr. Dmytro Matsypura.
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UClVaXgOJ6wO6xRUMmcJ2_RQ/videos
Looking forward to posting many other interviews! Stay tune!
On February 9th, we started a new semester in our Speaker’s Series with the talk by Dr. Hari Balasubramanian from UMass Amherst Mechanical and Industrial Engineering Department. Dr. Hari’s talk was on healthcare and he discussed the operational challenges in coordinating clinical and social needs for the sickest individuals in low and middle income settings. Prof. Balasbramanian worked on this research with his PhD students (including Ekin Koker who is our former Web Master), and collaborated practicioners from the industry. They used a highly granular dataset from Camden, New Jersey to simultaneously model both patient-level trajectories and workload estimates for care team members.
We enjoyed this talk tremendously and here are some pictures!
Our Chapter’s advisor Professor Nagurney took Dr. Hari and some students for lunch after the talk. In the following picture, you can spot Prof. Anna Nagurney, Prof. Hari Balasubramanian, Ekin Koker (former UMass INFORMS officer), Vijeta (VP), Mojtaba (Web Master) and Deniz (President).
We had a terrific end of semester party yesterday, December 8th 2017. The company and the food were amazing! We also had a really good turnout. Thanks to our Treasurer Rodrigo and President Deniz for arranging the food. Our event coordinator Emre did a really good job on arranging the room as well.
Faculty and students came from Isenberg School Operations and Information Management, Mechanical and Industrial Engineering and Transportation Departments . We enjoyed chatting with our Chapter’s Advisor, Professor Anna Nagurney and Isenberg School OIM Department Chair Profesor Iqbal Agha. It was so nice to see Professor Senay Solak and Professor Ahmed Ghoneim from the Isenberg School OIM Department as well. We also enjoyed talking to Professor Hari Balasubramanian, Professor Erin Baker, Professor Ana Muriel from the Mechanical and Industrial Engineering Department. We were so happy to see Professor Peter Haas from the Computer Science Department, who is like a celebrity in our school now. Also, we can’t forget about Professor Ladimer Nagurney! It is always so nice to chat with him.
Here are some pictures to prove that we had a really fun time! This successful selfie was taken by Destenie. 
The following photo includes Vijeta (our VP), Rodrigo (our Treasurer), Destenie, Claire and Franklyn (our Webmaster).
Here is a great picture of our Chapter’s Advisor Professor Anna Nagurney and Isenberg School OIM Department Chair, Professor Iqbal Agha chatting with students.
We had a really fruitful 2017! Wish everyone a happy new year!
On November 3rd, our chapter hosted Prof. Dmytro Matsypura from the School of Business at the University of Sydney in Australia. Dr. Matsypura is also a former PhD student at the Isenberg School of Management. The talk was very interesting in terms of the application area and also the complexity of the mathematical models. Dr. Matsypura talked about wildfire management, specifically, prescribed burning. The objective function of the mathematical programming model considers not only the biology of the different fuel types, but also zones, and how often the prescribed burning takes place.. The problem is proven to be NP hard, in which Dr. Matsypura and his co-authors made the problem solvable by linearizing the objective function and coming up with heuristics to decrease the computation time. As UMass Student Chapter, we were honored to host Dr. Matsypura!
Here are some pictures from his talk.
Before the talk we also celebrated our Magna Cum Laude Award that we received at the Annual INFORMS Conference in Houston, 2017. We would like to thank our chapter’s advisor Professor Anna Nagurney for her endless support and guidance. Also a big shout out to our officers for this big success! Keep up the good work guys! Below is the photo of former + current chapter officers and our chapter’s advisor. Our former president Pritha is holding the award!
We also had the best cake. Below is the photo of the delicious cake!
We are keeping up the good work! On October 27, right after the Annual Conference in Houston, we hosted Dr. Shannon Roberts from our own MIE (Mechanical and Industrial Engineering) department. The talk was titled as “Leveraging Social Influence and Social Networks To Improve Driving Safety”. It was a very interesting talk and the audience asked many questions at the end. Dr. Roberts focused on the ineteraction between driving behavior of teenagers and their safety. Don’t text and drive people! She used agent-based network modelling and simulation models. The discussion part was so interesting as well. The audience was very successful in asking good questions, which could generate new research opportunities in the future.
Here are some pictures from the talk!
We also had a really good turnout. Below is the picture of the speaker and the audience.
As a side note, the room that we held this talk was for team based learning. UMass is so good at team work. We are looking for our next event next week!
It is always so nice to receive awards! This year, we were honored to receive our Magna Cum Laude award at the INFORMS Annual Conference in Houston. We are so happy to see the hardwork that we put throughout the year got appreciated! We would like to thank our former chapter officers and our chapter advisor, Professor Anna Nagurney, for her endless guidance and support!
Below is the picture of our Magna Cum Laude Award.
We went on stage to receive our award. Winning an award is one thing, but receiving it on stage with Michael Johnson is another! In this picture below, we have Rodrigo, Deniz, Michael Johnson, Pritha, Ekin and Sayeeda (left to right).
Below we have some other pictures as well, including a picture with our chapter advisor Professor Anna Nagurney as well. Just a side note, the food was amazing at the award ceremony too!
We are keeping up the good work and hope to be on stage again next year! See you all in Phoenix!
As an annual tradition, our student chapter tuned up for the INFORMS Annual Conference in Houston, TX. There were 5 doctoral students, including 3 of our officers, who presented their work and received feedback from the audience.
The first speaker was Rodrigo Mercado, who is our Treasurer, from MIE Department at UMass. He gave a talk on the renewable energy management in Mexico. Rodrigo had some fancy graphs!
Then, Deniz Besik, our president, from Operations and Information Management Department in Isenberg School gave her practice talk on capacity competition and outsourcing. The Generalized Nash Equilibrium Problem was very interesting!
Our third speaker was Pritha Dutta (former president), and she gave her talk on Game Theory and Blood Supply Chains.
Our last two speakers were Franklyn and Buyan, who gave their practice talk. Franklyn talked about deep uncertainty and energy modeling and Buyan talked about network models for the spread of diseases.
We are looking forward to our presentations at INFORMS Annual Conference! Plus, we are going to receive our Magna Cum Laude award. See you all in Houston!
On Friday 10/13/2017, we hosted an excellent talk by Dr. Renata Konrad of the Foisie School of Business at WPI in our UMass Amherst INFORMS Speaker Series. Dr. Konrad’s brilliant lecture was on: Opportunities to Address Human Trafficking Using Operations Research and Analytics. A comprehensive summary of the talk can be found here.
The photos from the event can be found below:
As UMass INFORMS, we went apple picking yesterday at the Cold Spring Orchard. It was nice to see an example of local food supply chains.
We also have the INFORMS bag from last year’s Student Leadership Conference in Baltimore!
INFORMS is pleased to welcome its new officers for the 2017/2018 academic year. To continue and foster the remarkable work of this chapter. You can check out names and positions of our executives here
2016/2017 officers were present for the handing over the ceremony.
