UMass INFORMS Student Chapter

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!

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!