Fall 2010 Activities

Excel Workshop (10/6)

Fall Social: Karaoke and Wii Night (10/7)

MS Project Workshop (10/21)

Halloween Party (10/30)

INFORMS Annual Meeting (11/6-11/11)

Tailgate: Pittsburg@USF (11/20)

Lecture Series (11/22)

Lecture Series (11/29)

President: Alfredo Santana Vice President: Qingwei Li Treasurer: Fethulah Caliskan Secretary: Ludwig Kuznia Lecture Series: Dayna Martinez Monica Puertas Webmasters: Patricio Rocha - Eleazar Gil OR Times Editors: Laila Cure Ozan Ozcan Diana Prieto

Our doctoral program has grown ex-traordinarily in the last few years. A sample of this is the arrival of ten new students this fall, all of them international. During their first stage in the program, they will adapt to the American education system, im-prove their English communication skills, approve their comprehensive examination, and select an advisor to start their research while working as TAs for one or more courses.

Meanwhile, we have students who are in a second stage that combines TA appointments with conduct-ing research activities, reading numerous papers, writing their first papers and presentations, and pre-paring themselves for the candidacy examination. Additionally, another group of students are complet-ing their third and final stage in the program: work-ing to increase their number of publications, prepar-ing proposal and dissertation defense, and teaching undergraduate courses.

It is our objective as a student chapter to design academic, social, and service activities to involve every student in the program, independently from the stage they are completing. In that way the new students will benefit themselves with the experience of the more senior students, while the senior ones will increase their professional skills, such as leader-ship, teamwork, organization, and social responsibil-ity.

There is a thin line between being a large program and being a big program. Thanks to all the work of faculty, students, and staff, our participation in con-ferences, and the number of awards received from members of our program has increased in the last few years. At every INFORMS conference, we are one of the largest and most participative delegations to attend. It is the main goal of the INFORMS stu-dent chapter at USF to help students achieve their potential, becoming one of the biggest Industrial En-gineering research-oriented graduate programs in the nation. ■

By

Alfredo Santana-Reynoso

INFORMS@USF President 2010 - 2011

A Newsletter from Student Chapter of INFORMS @ IMSE, USF

Welcome from the Incoming President

Volume 6, Issue 1 Fall 2010

Inside this issue:

OR/MS Rankin

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Spring in Photos …………………

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IMSE at INFORMS, AUSTIN…

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Incoming Chapter Committee

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Rankings are ubiquitous. They provide a way of sorting things using some criteria. In several professional sports, they are vital; without them there will be no way of organiz-ing the playoff season and determining a champion. We also use rankings just for fun i.e., when thinking on our favorite, say, 5 songs/movies/TV shows. The key element when coming up with a ranking is the criteria, the set of attributes that are considered to determine the positions on the ranking. In the case of professional sports, the crite-ria are simple: the number of wins by a team; in the case of our favorite songs/movies/tv shows things get more complicated. It would be actually hard for me to explain how I would choose my favorite movies. I would probably think on how good the acting was, the plot, the photography, and how I related to (connected with) the movie. Then, I would need to assign a weight to each of these attributes which seems to me fairly complicated. Some rank-ings are definitely no easy task.

A few weeks ago I was asked by members of the INFORMS Education Committee to compile a list of OR/MS programs in the U.S. and abroad to post on the INFORMS website. The idea was to obtain the name of each program (Industrial Engineering, Management Science, etc) and rank them using different criteria. We first used a criterion based on the contributions of the programs to the practice literature in INFORMS journals (i.e., Number of practice papers published in Interfaces journal or Operations research journal). We started with this criterion because we had the data. In 2007, Professor Michael Rothkopf from Penn State published an article on Interfaces with the data and the final ranking he obtained. Later on, we decided to directly ask the OR/MS programs the following information: number of OR/MS-focused undergraduate degrees awarded per year, number of OR/MS-focused Master's degrees awarded per year, number of OR/MS-focused Ph. D. degrees awarded per year, and number of professors who are major contributors in OR/MS. Our criteria are oriented towards size of the OR/MS programs as opposed to contributions to the practice literature. We are still in the process of processing the data collected. It will be hard to come up with a weight for each of the attributes (in the case we decide to use weights).

More recently (actually, a few days ago), the National Research Council (NRC) published its ranking of doc-toral programs in the U.S., including what they called doctoral programs in Operations Research, Systems Engineering and Industrial Engineering. The methodology used was more complex than in previous NRC rankings. Two types of rankings based on different attributes were developed: the S-Ranking was obtained by selecting around 20 attributes of a doctoral program, then a number of faculty members (say, 100) were sur-veyed about the attributes they believed were more important. Weights were assigned based on this survey of faculty members. Next, a method called the random halves was used to rank the doctoral programs. The ranking was constructed based on the weights from 50 the surveys, which were randomly chosen. This proc-ess was repeated for different batches of 50 surveys a total of 500 times. Since the position in the ranking of a particular program was likely to change with the batch considered, they eliminated the best rankings (top 5%) and worst rankings (bottom 5%) of each program. Thus, the ranking of a program is given by an interval (a,b) which can be read as follows: “with 90% of confidence, the rank of a program lies between a and b”.

In addition to the S-Ranking, they developed an R-Ranking which was obtained by asking faculty members to directly grade a sample of doctoral programs from 1 to 6. Then, using again the random halves method, the final R-Raking of a program was obtained.

As you can see, there are things that are even harder to systematically rank than your favorite 5 movies.■

By: Patricio Rocha

PhD. Candidate

Rocha’s Corner

OR/MS Rankings

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Spring 2010 in Photos

These are some photos of our highlights from this past spring:

▲ INFORMS@USF launched the Graduate Research Exchange Program, in collaboration with the University of Florida. Petros Xanthopoulos from the UF INFORMS student chapter, came to USF and Qingwei Li, from the INFORMS@USF student chapter went to UF. Both shared their research, met with other students and toured the campuses. (March 19th/26th 2010)

Members of the INFORMS@USF student participated in low and high ropes course offered by USF Campus recreation at the Riverfront Park. (May 5th, 2010) ▼

Our third annual potluck buffet was a success. Our members cooked food from their countries and shared it with our IMSE de-partment. (April 23rd, 2010) ▼

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Volume 6, Issue 1

Fall 2010

IMSE at INFORMS 2010, Austin, TX. Here is a summary of our presentations at the upcoming INFORMS Annual Meeting at Austin, TX.

Editors:

• Laila Cure • Diana Prieto • Ozan Ozcan •

IMSE 4202 E. Fowler Ave. ENB 118

Tampa FL, 33620 Tel: (813) 974-5591

Fax: (813) 974-974-5953

informs@eng.usf.edu http://informs.eng.usf.edu

Patricio Rocha, Tapas K. Das Sunday Nov 07, 11:00 - 12:30 Carbon Revenue Redistribution Strategies for Electric Power Markets

Ludwig (Louie) Kuznia, Grisselle Centeno, Zhixin Miao, Bo Zeng

Sunday Nov 07, 11:00 - 12:30

Stochastic Optimization of Power Supply System in Isolated Islands with Renewable Energy

Laila Cure, Jose Zayas-Castro, Peter Fabri Monday Nov 08, 08:00 - 09:30 A Methodology to Guide Risk Analysis in Health Care Delivery Systems

Long Zhao, Bo Zeng, Lingling Fan Monday Nov 08, 14:40-15:00 Robust Unit Commitment Problem with Demand Response and Renewable Energy

Qingwei Li, Alex Savachkin, Bo Zeng Monday Nov 08, 16:30 - 18:00 Decision Support Models for Design of Reliable Distribution Networks

Diana Prieto, Tapas K. Das, Sharad Malavade, Alfredo Santana-Reynoso, Alex Savachkin

Monday Nov 08, 16:30 - 18:00

Models for Public Health Crisis Management During a Pandemic

Ozan Ozcan, Kingsley Reeves Tuesday Nov 09, 13:30 - 15:00 Building Relational Capital in Environmental Manufacturing to Substitute Vertical Integration

Fethullah Caliskan, Ozan Ozcan, Kingsley Reeves Tuesday Nov 09, 13:30 - 15:00 The Impact of Supply Chain and Knowledge Diffusion Network Structure on Innovation

Jose Zayas-Castro, Peter Fabri, Phillip Foulis, Alcides Santander-Mercado Tuesday Nov 09, 13:30 - 15:00 Analysis of Temporal Variations of Laboratory Test Results of Patients in Intensive Care Units

Monica Puertas, Sandro Paz, Bo Zeng, Ruth Murrugarra (Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute), Luis Chavez-Bedoya, (Northwestern University)

Tuesday Nov 09, 16:30 - 18:00

Large Scale Optimization Model using Benders Decomposition for a Production and Distribution Problem

Bo Zeng, Yu An, Yu Zhang. Tuesday Nov 09, 08:00 - 09:30 Design of Reliable Hub-spoke Network

Alfredo Santana-Reynoso, Sharad Malavade, Diana Prieto Wednesday Nov 10, 15:30 - 17:00 Decision Support Systems for Pandemic Influenza (PI) Surveillance

Kingsley Reeves, Fethullah Caliskan, Ozan Ozcan Wednesday Nov 10, 15:30 - 17:00 The Vertical Integration Evolution of Sustainability Focused Companies

Dayna L. Martinez, Tapas K. Das, Alex Savachkin Wednesday Nov 10, 15:30 - 17:00 Non-pharmaceutical Interventions (NPI) for the Mitigation of Pandemic Influenza