Brenda Dietrich, PhD
IBM Fellow
Vice President, Business Analytics and Mathematical Sciences
IBM

IFORS DISTINGUISHED LECTURE
Analytics for the Next Era of Computing

New applications of computing are being enabled by instrumentation of physical entities, aggregation of data, and the analysis of the data.  The resulting integration of information and control permits efficient and effective management of complex man-made systems.  Examples include transportation systems, buildings, electrical grids, health care systems, governments, and supply chains. Achieving this vision requires extensive data analysis, modeling, and optimization -- in short, the application of operations research. In this talk some early examples of the use of OR to enable this vision will be described. Our field's potential and some emerging challenges will also be discussed.

Brenda Dietrich is an IBM Fellow and Vice President in the IBM Research Divisions. She leads IBM's research activities in Business Analytics and Mathematical Sciences, and supports software products and consulting in these areas. She is responsible for both basic research in computational mathematics and related fields, and the development of novel business applications based on the application of mathematical models within industry. She has been the president of INFORMS and is an INFORMS Fellow. She holds a dozen patents, has co-authored numerous publications, and co-edited the book Mathematics of the Internet: E-Auction and Markets. She holds a BS in Mathematics from the University of North Carolina and an MS and PhD in OR/IE from Cornell. Her personal research includes manufacturing scheduling, services resource management, transportation logistics, integer programming, and combinatorial duality.

Darrell Duffie, PhD
Dean Witter Distinguished Professor of Finance
Graduate School of Business
Stanford University

OMEGA RHO DISTINGUISHED LECTURE
Systemic Risk and the Replumbing of the Financial System

Darrell Duffie is the Dean Witter Distinguished Professor of Finance at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business.  Duffie, the author of Dynamic Asset Pricing Theory (Princeton University Press, Third Edition), is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a past President of the American Finance Association, and serves on the board of directors of Moody’s Corporation and on the Financial Advisory Roundtable of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. His most recent books are How Big Banks Fail (Princeton University Press, 2010), Measuring Corporate Default Risk (Oxford University Press, 2011), and Dark Markets: Asset Pricing and Information Transmission in Over-the-Counter Markets, (Princeton University Press, 2012).

OMEGA RHO, the official Honor Society of INFORMS, was founded in 1976 to recognize superior scholarship and encourage leadership in operations research, management science, and related disciplines. The society has 39 active collegiate chapters, more than 5,000 student and faculty members and is a member of the Association of College Honor Societies. In addition to sponsoring OMEGA RHO Distinguished Lectures at INFORMS International and Annual meetings, OMEGA RHO provides financial support to the annual INFORMS Colloquium. Honorary Membership in OMEGA RHO is bestowed upon individuals who provide leadership and extraordinary support for the encouragement of operations research and management science through their professional activities. Prior to delivering the OMEGA RHO Distinguished Lecture, Darrell Duffie will be inducted as an Honorary Member of OMEGA RHO. Visit OMEGA RHO online.

Avishai Mandelbaum, PhD
Benjamin & Florence Free Professor of Industrial Engineering & Management
Technion, Israel

Data-Based Service Networks: A Research Framework for Asymptotic Inference, Analysis and Control of Service Systems

The lecture is on Service Systems, pertaining to telephone call centers, hospitals, public services, banks, airports, supermarkets and more. The focus is on operational performance - e.g. customer flow and system congestion (with operational characteristics serving also as surrogates for financial, psychological and clinical performance). And my mathematical framework is asymptotic queueing theory, specifically fluid approximations and their diffusion refinements. Queueing theory is ideally suitable to capture the operational tradeoff that is at the core of any service - quality vs. efficiency. Asymptotic analysis has the potential to accommodate service characteristics which are otherwise intractable.

Two cases in point are the Erlang-A and Erlang-R models: the first has become the most prevalent call center model, and the second applies to emergency departments - both are simple models that valuably portray complex realities. This raises several fundamental research questions: why are such simple models robust; what are the limitations of their robustness; and which alternative models would overcome the limitations. I shall address these questions within my asymptotic framework, developing models directly from data and validating their value against actual service systems. (This is in contrast to prevalent practice where models are typically remote from data, and asymptotic approximations are validated for accuracy against their originating mathematical models. )

The ultimate goal is a platform for automatic creation of data-based asymptotic models, which will be universally accessible for applications by researchers, students and ultimately practitioners. This goal is currently pursued at the Technion SEE Laboratory http://ie.technion.ac.il/Labs/Serveng.

Avishai Mandlebaum is the Benjamin & Florence Free Professor of Industrial Engineering and Management, Technion, Israel. He has a B.Sc. in Mathematics and Computer Science and an M.A. in Statistics, both summa cum laude from Tel-Aviv University. His Ph.D. is in Operations Research, from Cornell University. After graduation, in 1983, he joined the Graduate School of Business at Stanford University. He then left the U.S.A., in 1991, to assume a position at the Technion. Prof. Mandelbaum is an INFORMS fellow. He was an associate editor of the leading journals in his field, and his research and teaching have enjoyed various prizes, in particular the inaugural Yanai Prize for Academic Excellence at the Technion. His research has focused on stochastic models (analysis, asymptotics, control) and statistics, with applications to service systems, notably tele-services (eg. telephone call centers) and healthcare (eg. patient flow through emergency departments).
Prof. Mandelbaum is the founder and director of the Technion SEE Laboratory (SEE = Service Enterprise Engineering). This lab maintains a unique rich repository of data from service operations, and it serves as a hub for Service Science and Engineering research.


Yuzhuo Zhang, PhD
President and CEO
Shenhua Group Corporation

Exploration of the Optimum Solution to the Chinese Energy Plight

Eating up 3.48 billion TEC in 2011 makes China become one of the largest energy consumers in the world. One major challenge China’s energy supply faces is the coal-dominant primary energy mix (accounting for nearly 70%, which is about 48% of the total coal used in the world). Consequently, over-reliance on coal results in a substantial emission of SO2, NOX, TSP and CO2. Therefore, optimizing China’s energy mix has become a pressing task.

Through solid data, references and project practices, we have done a thorough analysis according to the developing trend of the global low-carbon economy and energy industry with a view of the technical advancement of clean coal technologies in the past decade. Based on this analysis, we proposed an energy optimization model under the dual constraints of economy and environment, and obtained a comprehensive solution that emphasizes “control on total consumption, clean conversion and structural optimization.” The target is to decrease the share of China’s coal consumption to under 50% of its total energy consumption in the next 30 years. In the meantime, with green and efficient coal-based energy technologies, China will effectively control the pollutants and greenhouse gas emissions during the energy conversion and will build a sustainable and optimum energy system.

Yuzhuo Zhang is President & CEO of Shenhua Group Corporation. He received the B.Sc. degree from Shandong University of Science and Technology, the master’s degree from China Coal Research Institute and the Ph.D. degree from University of Science and Technology Beijing and Tsinghua University. From 1992 to 1996, he worked as a post-doctoral fellow at University of Southampton, UK and a Research Fellow at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale, USA. Since 2002, he has been in charge of the development and construction of China’s Direct Coal Liquefaction Demonstration Project as well as some other large-scale coal chemical projects. Patented Chinese Shenhua DCL technology has been adopted by the Demonstration Project. Following the mechanical completion in 2007, the first coal-in commissioning of the plant was successfully conducted In December 2008. And the first commissioning of the Baotou MTO project was successfully conducted in August 2010. Dr. Zhang is a Member of the Chinese Academy of Engineering, a member of  the Advisory Board of China’s National Energy Leading Group, Vice-Chairman of China Coal Society, Vice-Chairman of China Energy Research Society, a member of IEA Coal Industry Advisory Board.

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Co-Sponsors

Important Dates:

May 5, 2012
Authors’ deadline for final abstract changes

May 14, 2012
Early registration deadline