Monday, October 14, 2013

UMass Amherst Student Chapter Hosting Dr. Michael C. Fu of Maryland

Now is the time of the year when the Fall academic semester is in full swing. In New England, it is a time of beautiful foliage, pumpkins, Fall sports and activities, and also a time of many events.

The Isenberg School has a new homepage, which you may wish to check out,  which also highlights many events and news items -- thanks so much for noting the UMass Amherst INFORMS Student Chapter's receipt of the Magna Cum Laude award from INFORMS at our recent Minneapolis conference. 

This coming Friday, the student chapter will be hosting Professor Michael C. Fu of the Robert H. Smith School of Business at the University of Maryland. This event was scheduled weeks ago, and as may happen at this busy time of the year, there may be conflicts, so apologies.

We are also circulating the announcement in the College of Engineering, since Professor Weibo Gong helped with the organization, and in Computer Science, given the topic.

I saw Professor Fu recently at the INFORMS Fellows Award luncheon in Minneapolis and it was very nice to connect in person before his visit this Friday. The students prepared the nice flier above and it is an honor to be hosting such a distinguished speaker. Professor Fu holds degrees from MIT and a PhD from Harvard. He also was a Program Director at NSF for the Operations Research Program. Besides being a Fellow of INFORMS, he is also a Fellow of the IEEE.

We will be serving refreshments prior to his talk "Stochastic Gradient Estimation: Tutorial Review and Recent Research," in the Isenberg School Room 112 at 1:30 this Friday with Professor Fu's talk taking place there from 2:00-3:00PM.

Please join us, if you can.