Fall_2012.v7

USF’s 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 Bay’s 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.

A Newsletter from INFORMS Student Chapter @ USF

Welcome to IMSE at USF IMSE Engineering EXPO 2012

Volume 10,

Issue 1

Fall, 2012

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 Founda-

tion's designation of "Tier 1 Very High

Research Activity and Community

Engagement," continues to move for-

ward 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 in-

dustry. 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

Inside this issue:

Student’s 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

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I am going to start with the main con-cern that I had be-fore 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 mathe-matical 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 asso-ciated 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 acro-nyms, 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 proce-dures. 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 run things on my own.

On the fourth month, I was tasked with developing a model to solve a complex problem. Other similar tasks started coming my way subsequently. Fortunately, it has not stopped since then. The routine work is there too, but after performing the same procedures several times, it starts feeling like a break from the more research-oriented work.

The tools that have been very helpful so far are coding, coding, and coding. As you probably know, MS Excel is helpful when you are dealing with small stuff. However, when problems grow in size and you have to throw some statistics and optimization (the stuff that we like) in, the ability to code relatively fast is vital. So far the languages I have used the most are Python and SAS. The ability to write reports and papers has also been very helpful. My job requires writing internal and external reports in which you have to be able to describe what the numbers are telling and draw clear conclusions and recommenda-tions. I had to write a small internal paper too.

For the time being, I have not used optimi-zation methods at work (this can count as a bit of a disappointment). However, I am constantly using statistics, simulation, and probability methods. I am with a department that studies the reliability and resource adequacy of electricity systems.

Regional Transmission Organizations (RTO), such as PJM, have to comply with reliability criteria when it comes to plan-ning future resources to serve load. The North American Electric Reliability Cor-poration (NERC) requires that RTOs have sufficient resources so that the statistical expectation of not being able to serve load is only “1 day in 10 years”. The planning of resources to meet this criterion requires modeling future load and future resource availability which are both random varia-bles. Future electricity demand depends upon future (random) weather conditions; the availability of generation is also a random variable as power plants have ran-dom outages. Furthermore, the reliability value provided by new types of resources (storage devices, demand response, wind, solar plants, etc.) cannot be assessed with the old methods used for conventional power plants (coal, gas nuclear). These are the kind of topics that have kept me busy and will keep me busy in 2013.

Papers? Not yet. Besides finishing my dissertation paper (that I still have not properly finished, but I am almost there), there has not been time to write about any-thing else (pending task for 2013). Confer-ences? Only IEEE PES so far. INFORMS? Maybe some time in the future. What else? I just wanted to finish by saying that this first post-graduation year, despite a few difficulties, has been quite satisfactory.

Our Ph.D. Students! Current and Previous!

An interview with alumnus Patricio Rocha, Ph.D. and his work at the PJM

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. Huang’s re-search expertise is developing novel statistical and data mining models for facili-tating discoveries in biomedical research and de-cision-making in clinical practice. As statistics is an im-portant component of many biomedical researches, conventional statistics is main-ly 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 compu-tational technologies. With rapid advance-ment of sensing technologies, an abun-dance of data can be obtained such as neu-roimaging, 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 statisti-cal models that are capable of exploring the information-rich data to search for un-

known but informative patterns. Thus, Dr. Huang’s research aims to develop novel statistical models (i.e., Machine Learning models), which is capable to be an auto-matic & 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 Alz-heimer’s Institute on the Alzheimer’s Dis-ease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI), to identifying biomarkers for disease knowledge discovery, early diagnosis, treatment effect evaluation and personal-ized 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 under-stand 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 connec-tivity 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. Huang’s work has been published in high ranking journals, such as Neuroimag-ing, IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analy-sis and Machine Intelligence, Neural Infor-mation Processing System, Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining. He also serves as the reviewer for a num-ber of machine learning and medical deci-sion making journals, such as IEEE Trans-actions on Knowledge and Data Engineer-ing, IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Engineering, Pattern Recognition, Interna-tional Journal of Data Mining and Bioin-formatics, Neurocomputing, Neural Pro-cessing Letters, Artificial Intelligence in Medicine. He is the recipient of several international recognized best paper compe-titions, 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 [email protected] or call him at 813-974-2090.

Who has recently graduated?

Dayna Lee Martinez-Torres

Ph.D. in IE, Summer 2012 Position: Postdoctoral Research Asso-ciate, Department of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering . Location: Northeastern University, Boston. Research area: Healthcare Engineer-ing, 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.

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Lecture Series!

[email protected] http://informs.eng.usf.edu

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”.

Do you know that you have various discounts for many local stores ?

President Monica Puertas

Vice President Diego Martinez

Treasurer Seyed Javad Sajjadi

Secretary Anna Danandeh

Lecture Series Coordinators Sandro Paz,

Alireza Ghalebani

Webmasters Iman Nekooeimehr,

Mehrnaz Abdollahian

Newsletter Editors Sinan Onal

Felipe Feijoo

Advisor Dr. Jose Zayas-Castro

Committee 2012-2013

November 19, 2012

Improve tumor (PTV) dose distribution by using spatial

information in intensity modulated radiotherapy

(IMRT) optimization

Dr. Andres Uribe

University of California San Diego

November 1, 2012

Analytics, Big Data and

Operation Research

Dr. Mark S. Daskin

Department of Industrial and Operation Engineering

University of Michigan

November 30, 2012

Integrating technical and

Behavioral Factors to Form effective Work Teams

Dr. Ronald Askin

School of Computing, Informatics and Decision

Systems Engineering Arizona State University

November 15, 2012

Big Data Predictive

Analytics

Dr. Satish Bukkapatnam

Department of Industrial Engineering and Management

Oklahoma State University

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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!

INFORMS@USF in Photos

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, Diego Martinez, Serkan Gunpinar, Olga Raskina and Alireza Ghalebani

6

IMSE

4202 E. Fowler Ave. ENB 118

Tampa FL, 33620

Tel: (813) 974-2269

Fax: (813) 974-5953

INFORMS@USF

Community Service / Metropolitan Ministries Inc.

Dr. Alex Savachkin Email: [email protected]

Office: ENC 2201 Phone: 813-974-5577

Research Interests

Risk Analysis, Applied Stochastic Processes, Decision Support for Influenza Pandemics

New Associate Professor

Facebook group “ Informs at USF”

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

Follow us on social media

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 year´s 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