2011-2012

Operations Research Competition

Saturday March 31, 2012 - 12 - 6 PM

The 6 hour event was a great success with 25 participants on 8 different teams. Despite great presentations from all those involved, a winner had to be crowned. The problem was adapted from the MOPTA 2012 Competition so hopefully we will see some of the same names at the top of that competitions leader board as well. Congratulations to the top 3 placing teams:

1st Place

David Myers, Gregory Tauer and Michael Moskal

2nd Place

Tejswaroop Geetla, Howard Chen, Kyle Cunningham and Sabrina Casucci

3rd Place

Peiqiu Guan, Cen Song and Jie Xu

Thanks to our faculty judges Dr. Mark Karwan and Dr. Murat Kurt and UB INFORMS adviser Dr. Jun Zhuang for all their help on the day of the competition and in preparation for the competition.

Congratulations also to competition participants Gina M. Galindo-Pacheco and  Ruben D.Yie-Pinedo of the ISE department who went on to win the competition at the 12thMOPTA conference, under the advisement of Dr. Rajan Batta.

Visual Basic Technical Seminar

The Visual Basic tutorial session held on March 3^rd, 2012 was composed of two sessions. A basic session about basic variable definition, flow control, writing and reading data from excel. The second session was on how external Visual Basic 6 can interact with Arena, which is asimulation software. This seminar attracted both undergraduate and graduate students. They worked on the exercises in the lab along with this seminar and had a chance to practice what they have learned. Through this seminar, they became familiar with the Visual Basic programming language and obtained an understanding of the interaction of Arena and Visual Basic.

Visual Basic Tutorial Zip File

Arena Technical Seminar

Technical Seminar Series: New ISE Initiative Provides Extra Software Exposure to Engineering Students

It was standing room only in the computer lab on the fourth floor of Bell on the afternoon of February 17^th, 2011; with over 40 attendees, every chair was occupied and every computer used by one or two people. This was the scene of the first Technical Seminar offered by the UB Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS) group and the Industrial and Systems Engineering (ISE) Department on a simulation program called Arena®. The audience, ranging from sophomores to PhD students, listened raptly as Sabrina Casucci (PhD student in ISE studying Production Systems) went over the basics of how to make a model of the Department of Motor Vehicles. The presentation was done in two parts: first, an overview of the software and development of a simple example and second, a discussion of how to manipulate Arena® to perform more complex operations and integrate it with other programs like Microsoft Excel®.

The objective of the new seminar series is to provide students, graduate and undergraduate, with a more complete set of software skills for research, resume development, or professional application. The UB INFORMS group identified a lack of peer-to-peer interaction to help develop technical and professional skills, and decided to provide an avenue where students could help train other students. The seminars are taught by graduate students with practical experience using the software, providing an effective and informal learning environment for students at any level.

Arena Tutorial Zip File

Research Symposium Seminar

The 1^st annual INFORMS research symposium session held on November 11^st, 2011. The objective of this symposium is to provide a safe and informative environment for students in Industrial Engineering and Management Sciences. We invited some faculties and senior Ph.D. students to this event. They gave their feedback on the event as a whole and provided feedback to each of the speakers about their presentation.

List of Presenters

MATLAB Tutorial Session

The MATLAB tutorial session held on October 14^th, 2011 helped familiarize students with how to access MATLAB on or off campus while running through a variety of exercises. Attendees learned about matrix manipulations, file retrieval, plotting in MATLAB among other useful MATLAB functions. While the introductory session was geared toward undergraduate students, many graduate attendees learned how MATLAB could help them in their work as well.

Latex Workshop Session

Latex section was INFORMS’ first workshop in the 2011-2012 academic year.  The purpose of this workshop was to let the undergraduates and graduates students in the Industrial Engineering department know about INFOMRS.  As one of the missions of INFORMS, we did a great job in gathering a large group of students from both undergraduate and graduate class, and had an interesting and interacted teaching section.  It was taught by our Senior PhD student Gene Shan, where he first introduced the group the basic information of Latex and how it used for generating and formatting pdf files for various purposes.  Gene demonstrated Latex’s intricate workings by doing several examples, instructing the students to follow him and produce the same results.  This workshop was particularly useful for new graduate students in the department as they would use this program quite often in their studies.  The undergraduate students also had a fun time in learning how research at the graduate level can be done.