UMass INFORMS Student Chapter

We are very proud to announce that our student chapter has received the prestigious Cum Laude Award, in the framework of the INFORMS National Meeting in Phoenix! This award aims to recognize student chapters’ excellence and enhance their motivation for performing well. We would like to thank cordially all past and current members of our chapter for their efforts and achievements that led to this award!

Our chapter members are posing for a group photo, holding the award and sharing smiles.

Photo of the Cum Laude Award which has been awarded to our Chapter for the 12th consecutive year.

Congratulations Deniz, Sayeeda, Vijeta, Rodrigo, Mojtaba, Katerina, Franklin, Emre, Amro and, of course, Prof. Anna Nagurney!

More information about the award as well as a full list of past awardees can be found here: https://www.informs.org/Recognizing-Excellence/INFORMS-Prizes/Student-Chapter-Awards

As an annual tradition, our student chapter tuned up for the INFORMS Annual Conference in Phoenix, AR. Our presenters were 6 doctoral students of our university, all of which have served (or are currently serving) as our Chapter’s officers. The interaction between presenters and attendees was very vivid! The former received valuable feedback for their formal presentation in the Conference, whereas the latter had the chance to gain knowledge on very interesting optimization topics.

Deniz opened successfully the event with her presentation on complex food supply chain networks.

Vijeta presented his work on screening strategies for breast cancer using Peru as application area.

Pritha followed with her study on blood service organizations.

Zhangchen’s study was focused on unmanned aerial vehicles in delivery services.

Nazanin presented her work applied on HIV incidence.

Rodrigo performed the last presentation of the day in which he discussed about energy development using Mexico as application area.

We wish the best of luck to our presenters for their participation in the INFORMS Annual Conference!

For more information about the Conference, please visit: http://meetings2.informs.org/wordpress/phoenix2018/

 

Today, October 19^th, we were excited to organize our first event for the new academic year! Our first speaker was Dr. Priyank Arora, Assistant Professor of Operation Management at Isenberg School of Management, University of Massachusetts at Amherst. His presentation was entitled: “Serving Distressed Individuals: Balancing Advisory and Service Delivery Efforts in Nonprofits”. Through this talk, Dr. Arora informed us about his research on balancing advisory and service delivery efforts of resource-constrained NPOs in order to maximize their social impact. Both the modelling and the results of his study have attracted the audience which asked many interesting questions on the topic after the presentation.

Prof. Anna Nagurney, the chapter’s advisor, performed the speaker’s introduction.

The chapter’s new President, Katerina, referred to our speaker’s academic and research background.

Dr. Arora presented his work using an insightful application of his analysis on a practical context. He also gave valuable suggestions on how NPOs can implement his findings in designing their services.

The ordinary speaker’s interview was held after the event and the respective content can be found here.

Everyone is more than welcome to subscribe to our Youtube channel “UMass INFORMS” for all latest updates!

The graduation ceremony happened at UMass last week, May 11th and our chapters officers were also there. Dr. Shivani Shukla who is also our chapter’s former president and also Professor Nagurney’s former PhD graduated and we were there to support her. Here are some pictures from the event.

 

In the below photo, we have 4 UMass INFORMS Student Chapter presidents. From left to right, Dr Shivani Shukla, Deniz Besik, Pritha Dutta and Dr. Michael Prokle!

We held our end of semester party for 2018 on a very special day, May 4th! We had a really great time with a lot of faculty and friends across campus. The conversations were fun and the food was plenty and delicious! It was a relaxing and unwinding environment to celebrate the end of the semester for our chapter and the actual academic semester. This semester, our chapter, hosted 8 speakers, organized STEM Slam, and introduced the Youtube Chanel. We really enjoyed being a part of a chapter this successful! We would like to thank our chapter’s advisor Professor Anna Nagurney for her endless support and guidance and also the certificates that she gave us at the end of semester party. We would also like to thank our members and our hardworking officers who ser ved the chapter for a year. It was an amazing year! Congrats to all! Here are some pictures fromt the event.

 

 

Today, April 20th, we hosted Dr. Davit Khachatryan from Babson College. He received a PhD with a concentration in Management Science at the Isenberg School UMass Amherst. Now, he is conducting research on data analytics, especially on patent mining. He provides feedback to entrepreneurs. We have learned a lot about patents and how text mining is used in a research related to patent mining. This was the last talk of this semester and we are happy to end this semester with a great success! Thank you for those who came to the talks and showed interest in our chapter’s actitivities. See you at the end of semester party!

We organized yet another amazing STEM Slam Competition this year. Undergraduate and graduate students from all over the campus presented their research ideas in 3 minutes. We had a blast! Here are some pictures from the event.

Below is a picture of Destenie Nock who has presented the speakers.

Above is the picture of winners 2 from computer science and 1 from chemical engineering.

We had a really great time! Hope to have this event next year as well 🙂

On March 30th, we had the pleasure of hosting Dr. Burcu Balcik from Ozyegin University in Istanbul, Turkey.  The title of her talk was: Site Selection and Route Planning for Post-Disaster Rapid Needs Assessment Operations.  Dr. Balcik talked about needs assessment in the post disaster phase, especially for the short-term. She explained her solution techniques, which are on robust optimization. We really enjoyed her talk and meeting with her in person, and here are some pictures from her talk.

Our chapter’s advisor Professor Nagurney introduced Dr. Burcu Balcik. 

Dr. Burcu Balcik worked on disaster management and presented a case study from Van, Turkey, where an earthquake hit in 2011.

We had a tremendous audience, which included professors and students from all over the world (Turkey, India, Iran, Mexico, Bangladesh, Greece, South Korea and the United States).

After the lunch, as our tradition, Professor Nagurney took Dr. Burcu Balcik, Dr. Senay Solak (Isenberg OIM) and Dr. Chaitra Gopalappa (MIE), and two other students (Deniz and Pritha) for lunch at the UMass University Club. The food is, as always, amazing there! We love the crab cakes on top of a salad.

After the lunch, we came back to our office to hold the interview with Dr. Balcik. The interview is soon going to be available on Youtube. Our officers are working on the editing. We thank Rodrigo for his efforts. In the picture below, we are holding a present that Carlos Zetia from Concordia University sent!

On April 13th, we are organizing the STEM Slam Competition and looking forward to post some good news about that event!

 

Last Friday, 23/03/2018, we hosted Dr. Les Servi from MITRE Corporation. It was a very interesting talk and we learnt a lot about the importance of robust optimization. The title of the talk was “Robust Network Analysis”. We had a great audience and here are some pictures from the talk!

Our chapter’s advisor Professor Anna Nagurney and our president Deniz Besik gave an introduction to Dr. Servi before his talk. Dr. Servi graduated from Brown University and afterwards got her PhD degree in engineering from Harvard University. He has an extensive record of publications and 11 patents.  He is currently the Group Leader at the MITRE Corporation and conducts research in topics, cyber security, social media analysis, and portolio analysis. 

Dr. Servi talked about robust network analysis with hedging and without hedging.

We had a great audience, Professors and students coming from all over the campus.

As a tradition, we had our group picture with the speaker! Thank you so much for your talk Dr. Servi.

And our chapter’s advisor Professor Nagurney took us to lunch with the speaker after the talk. Professor Peter Haas from MIE department, and Professor Ladimer Nagurney were also with us at the lunch. From our officers, Rodrigo (Treasurer), Katerina (Secretary) and Deniz (President) were also present at the lunch. We really enjoyed this talk and looking forward to the next one!!

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!