Friday, November 11, 2016

Looking Forward to @INFORMS2016 in Nashville with Talks on Disaster Relief to Cybersecurity

Last week, I was at New York University for a fantastic Game Theory and Security conference that I blogged about and this week has been historic with the US Presidential election result on Tuesday. I am glad that we live in Amherst, Massachusetts.

As a faculty member, one keeps on marching on, and, this past Wednesday, the UMass Amherst INFORMS Student Chapter, which will be receiving its 11th award from INFORMS in as many years at  the INFORMS conference that takes place in Nashville, Tennessee, November 13-16, 2016, hosted a Tune-Up for this conference and two  other upcoming ones. The 6 students who presented on their research with their advisors did a wonderful job and, frankly, it was a great distraction from the election outcome. 3 of the 6 talks were on climate change issues, one was on healthcare, one on global distribution, and my student spoke on competitive supply chains with quality of fresh produce with applications to farmers' markets. She will be presenting this joint work of ours at the INFORMS Computing Society conference in Texas in January. We had several faculty and additional students show up to support the speakers. The event lasted two and a half hours with questions and comments to improve the students' talks, if need be.
Below are a few photos from the above event.
At the INFORMS conference in Nashville, I am a co-author of five paper presentations and four are now ready. Please visit the Supernetwork Center website at the Isenberg School of Management for the presentations that we have uploaded. I organized a session for this conference on Novel Applications of Network Optimization and look forward to the talks on supply chains, disaster relief, financial hedging, and medical resource allocation in epidemics. The annual INFORMS conference also always serves as a fabulous venue for a reunion of many of the Supernetwork Center Associates, so there will be nice get-togethers and also photo opportunities. Some of our presentation topics, from disaster relief to cybersecurity, that we will be presenting are shown below. I am also very excited that a collaborator from Colombia will be coming to the conference to speak on our joint work on auction mechanisms for Internet adoption.

In addition to sessions, there are many special events at this conference and I am looking forward to the INFORMS Fellows Awards lunch, the WORMS (Women in Operations Research and the Management Sciences) lunch, the Transportation & Logistics Society meeting, the INFORMS Computing Society meeting, some editorial board meetings,  and award ceremonies.  It will be a very busy but enjoyable conference.

Wishing everyone safe travels to Nashville and a fabulous INFORMS conference!