WINFORMS: The Washington DC Chapter of INFORMS

Meetings and Events 2008

Past Meetings and Events, 2008

“Screening Cargo Containers for Nuclear Material” by Laura A. McLay, Ph.D.

Date: Thursday, December 4, 2008
Location: George Washington University
A WINFORMS/IIE Joint Evening Program

We introduce a framework for screening cargo containers for nuclear material at security stations throughout the United States using knapsack problem, reliability, and Bayesian probability models. The approach investigates how to define a system alarm given a set of screening devices, and hence, designs and analyzes next-generation security system architectures. Containers that yield a systems alarm undergo secondary screening, where more effective and intrusive screening devices are used to further examine containers for nuclear and radiological material. We explore the relationships and tradeoffs between prescreening, secondary screening costs, and the efficacy of radiation detectors.

Laura A. McLay, Ph.D., is an Assistant Professor of Statistical Sciences and Operations Research at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, Virginia. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her research interests are in the field of operations research, with a particular focus on discrete optimization and algorithm design with application to homeland security and emergency response problems. Her research has been published in a wide spectrum of journals. She is a member of INFORMS, IIE, Tau Beta Pi, and Alpha Pi Mu.

“Applying the Economics of Technological Products to Terrorist Violence” by Brett D. Steele

Date: Tuesday, June 3, 2008
Location: Booz Allen Hamilton in Crystal City

This talk will address how a basic quantitative model or objective function of a design-and-manufacturing firm can be applied to analyze the effectiveness of terrorist organizations as well counter-terrorism campaigns. The model in question was originally presented in “An Economic Theory of Technological Products” in Technological Forecasting and Social Change (March 1995). It derived and analyzed an equation of a design-and-manufacturing firm's ROI in terms of the product's technological performance and production rate, as well as investments in product design, the production system, and the design and distribution of the sales argument. This talk will focus on the applicability of this objective function to terrorist organizations, provided they are viewed as a utility-seeking firm that designs and produces acts of “profitable” violence. By inverting this ROI relationship, the basic strategic challenges for a counter-terrorist campaign emerge as well.

Brett D. Steele is a Science and Technology Advisor at Ideal Innovations, Inc., and an Adjunct Associate Professor in Georgetown University's Security Studies Program. Dr. Steele earned his undergraduate and graduate degrees in mechanical engineer at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo and Stanford University, respectively, while working at NASA, Hewlett-Packard, and Exponent. He received his Ph.D. in the history of science and technology from the University of Minnesota in 1994, having written a dissertation on the symbiosis between early modern science and warfare, followed by postdoctoral studies at UCLA and MIT from 1995-2000. Dr. Steele served on the research staff of the RAND Corporation's Arroyo Center and the Homeland Security Institute's Operations Division from 2001-2007. In addition to UCLA's Department of History and School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, Dr. Steele has taught at Stanford University and the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm. He is the co-editor of The Heirs of Archimedes: Science and the Art of War through the Age of Enlightenment (MIT Press, 2005). Other publications include Military Reengineering between the World Wars (RAND, 2005) and "An Economic Theory of Technological Products" in Technological Forecasting and Social Change (March 1995).

“Advanced Text / Data Mining Reduces Social Security Disability Claims Backlogs” by Dr. Arnie Greenland

Date: Wednesday, May 7, 2008
Location: OMNI Engineering & Technology in Tysons Corner
A WINFORMS/IIE Joint Evening Program

Government agencies are buried in backlogs of decisions about claims for a large variety of benefits provided under government programs. This talk will discuss how advanced analytic methods, in particular data and text mining, were used to substantially reduce the backlogs of this workload at the Social Security Administration. The solution, developed for SSA, applies advanced analytic methods to identify the obviously disabled in real time from a daily applicant pool of 15,000 applications. The talk will include a discussion of the business problem, the details of the analytic solution, and the challenges of implementation in a real time operational environment. The talk will also describe the central role of the leadership at the Social Security Administration that championed the use of these tools and had the focus to make substantial changes to business processes to take full advantage of the analytical solutions obtained. The speaker, Dr. Arnie Greenland, was quoted on IBM’s work in this area in the February 25, 2008 issue of Federal Times.

Dr. Arnie Greenland is an IBM Distinguished Engineer and Executive within the Global Business Services, Public Sector Supply Chain Practice. He has over 30 years experience in delivering modeling and simulation services for both public- and private-sector clients. His experience includes both project management and technical leadership in the application of mathematical tools to business problems. These methods include operations research, business process modeling and simulation, business forecasting, network optimization, statistical analysis, data mining, and systems development. Dr. Greenland is a recognized expert in simulation modeling and has written numerous referred papers and delivered many papers at professional and technical meetings in this and related areas, and he is the IBM representative on the INFORMS Industry Roundtable, a group of industry leaders that advise the Operations Research profession on topics related to practice. In 2005, Dr. Greenland was recognized by IBM as an IBM Distinguished Engineer. Currently his primary responsibility is technical leadership, project management, and business development within the IBM Global Business Services public sector supply chain practice. In his prior role, Dr. Greenland founded the Operations Analytics group within IBM. This group focuses on advanced analytics, modeling, and simulation. Under his technical leadership, the Operations Analytics team served a large variety of clients including the Internal Revenue Service, the Social Security Administration’s Office of Disability, the U.S. Postal Service, the Federal Aviation Administration, and the Department of Defense. Arnie joined IBM with the acquisition of PricewaterhouseCoopers Consulting. Prior to his more than 13 years with IBM, he was a principal in a small professional services company engaged in the public sector market and worked for other professional services consulting firms. Early in his career he held an academic appointment at George Mason University in the Mathematical Sciences Department where he taught courses in Operations Research, Statistics and Mathematics.

“Can We Detect The Coming Plague?” by Douglas A. Samuelson

Date: Tuesday, April 8, 2008
Location: Booz Allen Hamilton in Crystal City
A WINFORMS/IIE Joint Evening Program

We consider how to develop metrics that could help us detect natural and human-caused outbreaks of infectious diseases and assess long-term health consequences of disasters. Naturally occurring biological threats already exhibit a pattern of increasing difficulty of detection, more subtle and complex attack pathways, taking advantage of social stigmas attached to some conditions, and exploitation of our own resources against us. (AIDS is one obvious example, but there is strong evidence that obesity and depression may have similar causes, at least in part.) All these factors complicate detection. Tests of a few proposed metrics lead to some disturbing conclusions.

Douglas A. Samuelson is a Principal Decision Scientist for Serco, an information technology and management consulting company headquartered in London, England, with a North American subsidiary headquartered in Vienna, Virginia. He is also President of InfoLogix, Inc., a research and development company in Annandale, Virginia. He has also been a Federal policy analyst, inventor, high-tech entrepreneur and executive, and university faculty member. He is perhaps best known for his popular and long-running “The ORacle” column in OR/MS Today. He has a D.Sc. in operations research from George Washington University.

“Modeling and Optimizing the Public Health Infrastructure for Emergency Response” by Eva Lee

Date: Tuesday, March 11, 2008
Location: Booz Allen Hamilton in Crystal City
A WINFORMS/IIE Joint Evening Program

City readiness and emergency response for biological, radiological, and infectious disease outbreaks involves multi-level strategic and operational planning of the public health infrastructure. We provide an overview infrastructure network and highlight some challenges in emergency preparedness and response. We then describe our experience with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and with state and county public health and emergency response administrators on large-scale dispensing of prophylactic medication. Strategic stockpile, medical supply distribution, locations of dispensing facilities, optimal facility staffing and resource allocation, routing of the population, and various logistics, transportation, and dispensing modalities will be discussed and analyzed.

Eva Lee is an Associate Professor of Industrial and Systems Engineering at Georgia Technology, and Director of the Center for Operations Research in Medicine and HealthCare. She is also a Senior Research Professor at the Atlanta VA Medical Center. She earned her doctorate from Rice University in 1993, has won several postdoctoral fellowships and other awards, and holds seven patents for medical systems and devices. Together, Professor Lee and Dr. Marco Zaider from Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center won the 2007 Edelman Prize for their work on using operations research to advance cancer therapeutics.

“Process Control Using Free-Style Text” by Ted Allen, Ph.D

Date: Tuesday, January 29, 2008
Location: OMNI Engineering & Technology in Tysons Corner
A WINFORMS/IIE Joint Evening Program

Massive databases with free-style text fields are a common feature of virtually all types of organizations from hospitals to aviation companies to governmental agencies. Perhaps the most promising approaches for intelligent, automatic text analysis are called “topic models”. Here, we propose so-called topic model process control (TMPC) approach for control charting systems characterized by free-style text. This approach identifies new trends and assignable cause. It is based on the recently introduced topic supervision using “anti-words” and chi-squared tests on the empirical topic percentages from Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC). We illustrate the benefits of TMPC through its application to monitoring demo download comments for an e-company. Interesting rare, unexpected topics are discovered after supervision representing new classes of customers, and the TMPC method correctly indicates unusual activities and their root causes.

Theodore (Ted) Allen, Ph.D. is an associate professor of industrial and systems engineering at The Ohio State University. He has over 40 refereed publications in applied statistics and operations research including a Springer textbook on engineering statistics. His work on text analysis was supported by grants from the U. S. Army Research Laboratory and an Ohio consulting company called Lextant. Ted has served as an officer for the quality, statistics and reliability (QSR) section of informs twice and organized numerous sections at national conferences. He is also the co-founder of the statistics and optimization software and consulting company Sagata Ltd. Sagata's work on improving allocations of voting machines to precincts was featured in the December 2007 issue of OR/MS Today.

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Upcoming WINFORMS Event

How to Measure Efficiency using Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA)
Speaker: David Lengacher

Tuesday, December 11, 2012

Booz Allen Hamilton
3811 N. Fairfax Drive
Arlington, VA 22203

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