UMass INFORMS Student Chapter

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.