Alumni

Department Honors & Awards

being adopted more widely as data science goes mainstream,” says Lahmar, the current Head of Data Science at Google Customer Solutions. “I consider myself fortunate enough to have had the chance to work at forward-looking companies that are eager to test and implement cutting-edge data solutions to business problems at scale.”

After working for Target, Walmart, IBM and others, Lahmar now manages a multidisciplinary team of 15 data scientists at Google. His team is made up of particle physicists, astrophysicists, economists, statisticians, industrial engineers, materials scientists, among others. Looking back at his years at the University of Minnesota, Lahmar again believes it was the faculty—many of whom are still with the ISyE department—who gave him the direction he needed to succeed today.

In one instance, Lahmar was being challenged by the high standards for writing in English held by scholarly publications in his field of study. “My advisor Saif Benjaafar highlighted the importance of communication skills,” Lahmar says. “To be successful, [Benjaafar told me] I need to have a growth mindset and strive to go beyond my current challenges and be the best in everything I do. This was one of the most genuine pieces of career advice that I continue to cherish till today.”

Years after graduating from the ISyE department, Lahmar says he is “fascinated” by how his PhD experience deeply shaped his career. At Google, Lahmar has a keen ability to quickly spot process inefficiencies, frame business problems, and transform them to mathematical models. “These are some of the critical skills,” he says, “that I developed at the University of Minnesota and now apply daily in my current role.”

Kevin Leder Awarded Grant Funding for Cancer Therapy Proposal

Leder’s research will be done collaboratively with faculty from the University of Minnesota and the University of Oslo.

Associate Professor Kevin Leder The Norwegian Centennial Chair Program has awarded seed grant funding to ISyE Associate Professor Kevin Leder for his cancer therapy research proposal.

In the first year of Leder’s project, he will receive $75,000, followed by a second allocation of funds in his second year based on progress. Funding comes from the NOCC program, a grant program established in 2006 with support from the Norwegian government.

Leder and collaborators intend to develop novel computational approaches to address the problem of heterogeneity in personalized cancer therapy. Leder’s project will include faculty from both the University of Minnesota and University of Oslo.

Saif Benjaafar Elected as INFORMS Fellow

A virtual Fellows Ceremony will be held this fall to honor Benjaafar and those elected as this year’s INFORMS Fellows. The Institute for Operations Research and Management Sciences (INFORMS) has elected Saif Benjaafar, Distinguished McKnight University Professor and Head of the Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering, as a Fellow. “This honor is reserved for a few select members of INFORMS,” said Pinar Keskinocak, President of INFORMS.

INFORMS Fellows are examples of outstanding lifetime achievement in operations research and the management sciences. They have demonstrated exceptional accomplishments and made significant contributions to the advancement of operations research and management sciences over a period of time.

INFORMS is the world’s largest professional association dedicated to and promoting the best practices and advances in operations research, management science and analytics to improve operational processes, decision-making and outcomes.

Recent Faculty Publications

Benjaafar, S., J. Ding, K. Kong, and T. Taylor. “Labor Welfare in On-Demand Service Platforms,” forthcoming in Manufacturing and Service Operations Management, 2020.

Yu, Y., S. Benjaafar, and H. Liu. “Price-Directed Cost Sharing and Demand Allocation among Service Providers with Multiple Demand Sources and Multiple Facilities,” forthcoming in Manufacturing and Service Operations Management, 2020.

Liu, Y., W. L. Cooper, and Z. Wang. “Information Provision and Pricing in the Presence of Consumer Search Costs,” Production and Operations Management, 28(7), 1603-1620, 2019.

Cui, Y., Z. He, and J. S. Pang. “Multi-Composite Nonconvex Optimization for Training Deep Neural Networks,’’ SIAM Journal on Optimization, 30(2), 1693–1723 2020.

Cui, Y., T. H. Chang, and M. Y. Hong. “A Study of Piecewise Linear-Quadratic Programs,” Journal of Optimization Theory and Applications, 186, 523–553 2020.

Gardner, K., J. Abdul Jaleel, A. Wickeham, and

S. Doroudi. “Scalable Load Balancing in the Presence of Heterogeneous Servers,” forthcoming in Performance Evaluation, 2020.

Estes, A. S., and M. O. Ball. “Equity and Strength in Stochastic Integer Programming Models for the Dynamic Single Airport Ground-Holding Problem,” Transportation Science, 54 (4), 944-955, 2020.

Ball, M.O., A. S. Estes, M. Hansen, and Y. Liu.

“Quantity-Contingent Auctions and Allocation of Airport Slots,” forthcoming in Transportation Science, 2020.

Ciocan, D. F., and K. Iyer. “Tractable Equilibria in Sponsored Search with Endogenous Budgets,” forthcoming in Operations Research, 2020.

Gorokh, A., S. Banerjee, and K. Iyer. “From Monetary to Non-Monetary Mechanism Design via Artificial Currencies,” forthcoming in Mathematics of Operations Research, 2020. Foo, J., K. Leder, and J. Schweinsberg. “Mutation Timing in a Spatial Model of Evolution,” Stochastic Processes and their Applications, 2020.

Gunnarsson, E. B., S. De, K. Leder, and J. Foo.

“Understanding the Role of Phenotypic Switching in Cancer Drug Resistance,” Journal of Theoretical Biology, 490, 110162, 2020.

Lu., Z., and Z. Zhou. “Nonmonotone Enhanced Proximal DC Algorithms for a Class of Structured Nonsmooth DC Programming,” SIAM Journal on Optimization, 29 (4), 2725-2752, 2019.

Lu, Z., Z. Zhou, and Z. Sun. “Enhanced Proximal DC Algorithms with Extrapolation for a Class of Structured Nonsmooth DC Minimization,” Mathematical Programming, 176 (1-2), 369-401, 2019.

Huang, J., A. Mani, and Z. Wang. “The Value of Price Discrimination in Large Random Networks,” EC’19: Proceedings of the 20th ACM Conference on Economics and Computation, 243-244, 2019.

Davarnia, D., J.-P. Richard, E. I. Icyuz-Ay, and B.

Taslimi. “Network Models with Unsplittable Node Flows with Application to Unit Train Scheduling,” Operations Research, 67 (4), 1053-1068, 2019.

Kim, J., M. Tawarmalani, and J.-P. Richard. “On Cutting Planes for Cardinality-Constrained Optimization Problems,” Mathematical Programming, 178 (1-2), 417-448, 2019.

Zhang, J., S. Ma, and S. Zhang. “Primal-Dual Optimization Algorithms Over Riemannian Manifolds: An Iteration Complexity Analysis,” Mathematical Programming, 2019.

Lu, C., Y. F. Liu, W. Q. Zhang, and S. Zhang.

“Tightness of a New and Enhanced Semidefinite Relaxation for MIMO Detection,” SIAM Journal on Optimization, 29 (1), 719 – 742 2019.

Zhang, Y., M. Lu, and S. Shen. “On the Values of Vehicle-to-Grid Selling in Electric Vehicle Sharing,” forthcoming in Manufacturing & Service Operations Management, 2020.

Recent Seminars

Fall 2019

September 4 Andrew Lim National University of Singapore

“Calibration of Robust Empirical Optimization Problems”

September 18 Sewoong Oh University of Washington

“The Power of Two Samples in Generative Adversarial Networks”

September 25 Jeff Kharoufeh Clemson University

“Staffing and Pricing in Co-Sourced Call Centers”

October 2 Erik Erickson Hennepin County

“Using Data and Analytics to Improve Human Resources”

October 9 Maged Dessouky University of Southern California

“Cost-Sharing Transportation Systems”

October 16 Lavanya Marla University of Illinois, UrbanaChampaign

“Data-Driven Greedy Policies and Information-Relaxation Bounds for Ambulance Allocation and Dynamic Redeployment”

October 25 James Orlin MIT

“The Shortest Cycle Problem and the Second Shortest Path Problem”

October 30 Yun Fong Lim Singapore Management University

“Integrating Anticipative ReplenishmentAllocation with Reactive Fulfillment for Online Retailing Using Robust Optimization”

November 6 Abhishek Roy Cargill

“CORTX—Optimization as a Service”

November 13 Marc Meketon Oliver Wyman

“Freight Railway Operations Research: A Look at the Most Important O.R. Applications in the Past 20 Years”

November 20 Kristopher Purens Descartes Labs

“Geospatial Big Data Analytics for Business and Conservation”

December 4 Michael Chmutov C.H. Robinson

“If You Could Send a Truck Anywhere, Where Would You Send It?”

December 11 Rhonda Righter University of California, Berkeley

“Service Systems with Server Compatibilities and Redundancy”

Spring 2020

February 12 Anil Aswani University of California, Berkeley

“Optimization Hierarchy for Fair Statistical Decision Problems”

Fall 2020

September 9 Hayriye Ayhan Georgia Institute of Technology

“Optimizing the Interaction between Residents and Attending Physicians”

September 16 Matthias Poloczek Uber AI

“Scalable Bayesian Optimization for High Dimensional Expensive Functions”

September 23 Radhika Kulkarni SAS Institute Inc.

“Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence and Optimization: Opportunities for InterDisciplinary Innovation”

September 30 Chrysanthos E. Gounaris Carnegie Mellon University

“Decision-making Across Scales: From Supply Chains to Materials Nanostructure”

October 21 John Khawam Stitch Fix

“Making the Most of Inventory: Advance Inventory Availability at Stitch Fix”

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