Welcome to IMSE at USF

My warmest greetings to you! You would be delighted to know that University of South Florida, one of only 40 public US universities (among 1075 ranked) with Carnegie Foundation's designation of "Tier 1 Very High Research Activity and Community Engagement," continues to move forward with student success as its major academic focus. The university generated more than $411 million in research funding in 2012 and in 2011 was ranked 50th in the nation for research expenditure by the National Science Foundation. The IMSE faculty and staff are dedicated to creating conditions for student success through innovative teaching, holistic mentoring, and cutting edge research and innovation. The department offers bachelor's, master's, and doctoral programs in Industrial Engineering (leading to BSIE, MSIE, MIE, and Ph.D. degrees), a master of science degree in Engineering Management (MSEM), and several graduate certificate programs in areas of contemporary needs of today's business and industry. IMSE Faculty members have been busy in the year 2012 in implementing a major update in BSIE curriculum with a focus on incorporating Engineering Analytics. Our BSIE students will now have a four course analytics sequence as part of their curriculum. Two courses in Advanced Analytics (I and II) have also been developed for the graduate students to sharpen their research skills in analytics. Dr. Shuai Huang, our newest faculty member, adds significantly to our strength in analytics. Currently, we are in the process of hiring yet another new faculty who will likely add further support our analytics focus. In 2012, IMSE has also launched an industry consortium (icIMSE) and we are in the process of inducting consortium members from local industry. The consortium will bring opportunities for real life class projects, longer term research, internships, and jobs for our students. Most sincerely, Tapas K. Das Professor, Department Chair

IMSE Engineering EXPO 2012

USFs Engineering EXPO seeks to educate K-12 students on the importance of math, science, engineering, and technology as life skills. The Engineering EXPO is a free event and an unique opportunity to meet and talk with Tampa Bays local engineers and engineering student organizations at USF. EXPO features hands on exhibits and shows that help encourage more students to pursue fields in science and mathematics. At the IMSE Department, we aimed at developing the interest of the visitors in wireless sensor networks and computer simulations of complex systems. We demonstrated a wireless sensor network that can extract ECG signals from the human body and transmit them wirelessly to a computer. Also, we created two computer simulations that simulate the patient flow in an emergency department of a hospital and the design of medical devices (aka virtual manufacturing). The value of these simulations is to act as a What if tool, so that unanticipated problems can be detected before incurring costly and time-consuming investments. More importantly, our visitors can interact with these experiments and gain a better understanding of how new technologies are used by industrial engineers to make our lives better.

Inside this issue:

Students column 2 Doctoral Student Leadership Institute 2 Interview with Dr. Shuai Huang 3 Who has recently graduated? 3 INFORMS Lecture Series 4 INFORMS activities and awards 5 Community service 6 Faculty news and social media 6

1 ssue I , 0 e 1 Volum 2012 Fall,

A Newsletter from INFORMS Student Chapter @ USF

Our Ph.D. Students! Current and Previous! An interview with alumnus Patricio Rocha, Ph.D. and his work at the PJM
I am going to start with the main concern that I had before starting at my current job. As a PhD student, I learned to enjoy the investigation of a problem (especially in the electricity sector) and the development of a mathematical model to tackle it. My concern before starting work was that I was not going to have the chance to do that, that all my responsibilities were going to be associated with performing routine work. The first couple of months I was not doing any routine work but I was not developing any model either. It was all about learning procedures, the company structure, the specific tasks that the department I was working for performed, gazillions of acronyms, and some of the software I was going to be using. Those days were rather easy. On the third month or so, the routine work started. The software and methods were all in place, I just had to follow the procedures. The procedures though were not simple; there were multiple steps that needed to be followed in the proper order. To learn faster, I started recording the screen of my computer whenever I was replicating what a more experienced co-worker was teaching in some tutorial sessions. The recorded videos proved to be extremely helpful later on when I had to Regional Transmission Organizations (RTO), such as PJM, have to comply with run things on my own. On the fourth month, I was tasked with reliability criteria when it comes to plandeveloping a model to solve a complex ning future resources to serve load. The problem. Other similar tasks started North American Electric Reliability Corcoming my way subsequently. Fortunately, poration (NERC) requires that RTOs have it has not stopped since then. The routine sufficient resources so that the statistical work is there too, but after performing the expectation of not being able to serve load same procedures several times, it starts is only 1 day in 10 years. The planning feeling like a break from the more research of resources to meet this criterion requires modeling future load and future resource -oriented work. availability which are both random variaThe tools that have been very helpful so bles. Future electricity demand depends far are coding, coding, and coding. As you upon future (random) weather conditions; probably know, MS Excel is helpful when the availability of generation is also a you are dealing with small stuff. However, random variable as power plants have ranwhen problems grow in size and you have dom outages. Furthermore, the reliability to throw some statistics and optimization value provided by new types of resources (the stuff that we like) in, the ability to (storage devices, demand response, wind, code relatively fast is vital. So far the solar plants, etc.) cannot be assessed with languages I have used the most are Python the old methods used for conventional and SAS. The ability to write reports and power plants (coal, gas nuclear). These are papers has also been very helpful. My job the kind of topics that have kept me busy requires writing internal and external and will keep me busy in 2013. reports in which you have to be able to describe what the numbers are telling and Papers? Not yet. Besides finishing my draw clear conclusions and recommenda- dissertation paper (that I still have not tions. I had to write a small internal paper properly finished, but I am almost there), too. there has not been time to write about anyFor the time being, I have not used optimi- thing else (pending task for 2013). Conferzation methods at work (this can count as a ences? Only IEEE PES so far. INFORMS? bit of a disappointment). However, I am Maybe some time in the future. What else? constantly using statistics, simulation, and I just wanted to finish by saying that this probability methods. I am with a first post-graduation year, despite a few department that studies the reliability and difficulties, has been quite satisfactory. resource adequacy of electricity systems.

Sinan Onal, Doctoral Candidate

He was awarded a Doctoral Students Leadership fellowship, a two-year program that offers a one-semester leadership course, at least two semesters of shadowing effective leaders, development and implementation of a leadership plan, participation at leadership conferences/ forums, and several workshops. Why become a Leadership Institute fellow ? Gain perspectives on effective leadership theories and practices from top university, industry and community leaders. Develop crucial leadership skills through the Leadership Workshops offered exclusively to Fellows each semester. Travel to approved leadership forums and conferences, with funds provided by the Graduate School. Receive mentoring from university and other leaders through the Institute's shadowing experiences. Develop and execute a personalized leadership Action Plan with the guidance of the Dean and Associate Dean of the Graduate School as well as other members of the Graduate School Leadership team. Create a personalized Leadership Portfolio to document and display your accomplishments as a Leadership Fellow. Receive a certificate recognizing your accomplishments as a Leadership Institute Fellow upon successfully completing all Institute requirements. To apply Doctoral Student Leadership Institute go to www.grad.usf.edu
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Job Market? ... Interview with Dr. Shuai Huang

Dr. Huangs research expertise is developing novel statistical and data mining models for facilitating discoveries in biomedical research and decision-making in clinical practice. As statistics is an important component of many biomedical researches, conventional statistics is mainly a manual & confirmatory tool that is only used to test a given hypothesis. This role of statistics has been shifted by the rapid advancement of sensing and computational technologies. With rapid advancement of sensing technologies, an abundance of data can be obtained such as neuroimaging, genomics, proteomics, lab tests, demographics, and clinical activities, which provides rich information about the underlying biological mechanisms. On the other hand, the enormous computational power we can have today provides us the opportunity to build sophisticated statistical models that are capable of exploring the information-rich data to search for unknown but informative patterns. Thus, Dr. Huangs research aims to develop novel statistical models (i.e., Machine Learning models), which is capable to be an automatic & exploratory tool for facilitating novel discoveries in biomedical research and generating potential hypothesis through exploring the data in an intelligent way. Dr. Huang has worked with Banner Alzheimers Institute on the Alzheimers Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI), to identifying biomarkers for disease knowledge discovery, early diagnosis, treatment effect evaluation and personalized medicine. For example, one research topic is to build brain connectivity network from Neuroimaging data, such as PET scans or fMRI scans, in order to understand how the disease pathology disrupts the cognitive functions. He built automatic machine learning models to learn the whole brain connectivity network from Neuroimaging data. For example, based on the ADNI data, the learned brain connectivity networks for AD patient and Normal aging subjects are shown in the below. By comparing the brain connectivity networks of the two groups, a lot of novel patterns can be detected which maybe correlated with the disease progression and cognitive deficits. Dr. Huangs work has been published in high ranking journals, such as Neuroimaging, IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, Neural Information Processing System, Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining. He also serves as the reviewer for a number of machine learning and medical decision making journals, such as IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering, IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Engineering, Pattern Recognition, International Journal of Data Mining and Bioinformatics, Neurocomputing, Neural Processing Letters, Artificial Intelligence in Medicine. He is the recipient of several international recognized best paper competitions, such as the best student paper in Data Mining subdivision of INFORMS, the best student paper in Quality, Statistics and Reliability subdivision of INFORMS, the best dissertation poster award in IERC. To contact Dr. Huang, please email him by shuaihuang@usf.edu or call him at 813974-2090.

Who has recently graduated?

Dayna Lee Martinez-Torres
Ph.D. in IE, Summer 2012 Position: Postdoctoral Research Associate, Department of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering . Location: Northeastern University, Boston. Research area: Healthcare Engineering, pandemics.

Marbelly Davila
Ph.D. in IE, Fall, 2012 Position: Associate Professor, School of Mechanical Engineering Location: Universidad de Los Andres, Venezuela. Research area: Healthcare Systems Engineering

Ludwig Kuznia
Ph.D. in IE, Summer, 2012 Position: Decision Science Consultant at Walt Disney Parks and Resorts Location: Orlando, Florida. Research area: Stochastic optimization.

Lecture Series!

November 1, 2012 Analytics, Big Data and Operation Research Dr. Mark S. Daskin Department of Industrial and Operation Engineering University of Michigan

November 15, 2012 Big Data Predictive Analytics Dr. Satish Bukkapatnam Department of Industrial Engineering and Management Oklahoma State University

November 19, 2012

Improve tumor (PTV) dose distribution by using spatial information in intensity modulated radiotherapy (IMRT) optimization

November 30, 2012

Integrating technical and Behavioral Factors to Form effective Work Teams

Dr. Ronald Askin

Dr. Andres Uribe

University of California San Diego

School of Computing, Informatics and Decision Systems Engineering

Arizona State University

Do you know that you have various discounts for many local stores ?
The Employee Perks & Discounts Program is just one of many benefits offered at USF. Faculty and staff can receive various discounts for goods, services and recreation. USF Human Resources has provided this list of links because they contain information which may be of interest to our USF employees. To see the list just search Employee Perks & Discounts at USF.

Committee 2012-2013
President Vice President Treasurer Secretary Lecture Series Coordinators Webmasters Newsletter Editors Advisor Monica Puertas Diego Martinez Seyed Javad Sajjadi Anna Danandeh Sandro Paz, Alireza Ghalebani Iman Nekooeimehr, Mehrnaz Abdollahian Sinan Onal Felipe Feijoo Dr. Jose Zayas-Castro

informs@eng.usf.edu 4

http://informs.eng.usf.edu

INFORMS@USF in Photos

Riverfront Park Picnic

INFORMS @ USF organized a welcome picnic for doctoral students, faculty and their families to get together, and enjoy the nature in Florida!

USF student chapter @ Annual INFORMS meeting, Phoenix, AZ, 2012 INFORMS student Chapter @ USF is a winner of the INFORMS Student Chapter Annual Award at the level of Summa Cum Laude
From left to right: INFORMS President Dr. Terry Harrison, Seyed Javad Sajjadi , Felipe Feijoo, Sandro Paz, Mehrnaz Abdollahian, Monica Puertas, DiegoMartinez, Serkan Gunpinar, Olga Raskina and Alireza Ghalebani

INFORMS@USF Community Service / Metropolitan Ministries Inc.

In March 2012, their branch in Tampa contacted INFORMS at USF and was looking for some Industrial Engineering students to help them with the design of their Holiday Tent. Our INFORMS student chapter had helped them with a similar project a couple of years ago. This years tent was going to be deployed in a new site in downtown, Tampa. This project helps about 30,000 poor families in the Tampa Bay area supplying food and toys during November and December. Holiday Tent was up from October through December 2012, this projects takes up to 800 volunteers a day, Individuals and groups who may register clients, sort donations, stock the market, assist clients with their shopping, play with children, clean, lead a prayer time, or even perform on tent's stage.

Volume 10, Issue 1 Fall 2012

New Associate Professor

Follow us on social media

Facebook group Informs at USF

Web page http://informs.eng.usf.edu

Dr. Alex Savachkin Email: alexs@usf.edu Office: ENC 2201 Phone: 813-974-5577 Research Interests Risk Analysis, Applied Stochastic Processes, Decision Support for Influenza Pandemics

IMSE 4202 E. Fowler Ave. ENB 118 Tampa FL, 33620 Tel: (813) 974-2269 Fax: (813) 974-5953
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