OR/MS Tomorrow
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Fall/Winter 2019 Issue:
The online student membership magazine for INFORMS. The bi-annual publication provides a look at operations research and management science from the perspective of young people in those fields. Edited by a team of students and junior faculty, the magazine is written for students and aims to introduce topics relevant to them, highlight their accomplishments, and promote awareness of current events and issues in OR and MS.
Using Mathematical Optimization to preserve Biodiversity
Mathematical optimization is defined as the “science of better” and is used every day by academics and practitioners to solve a myriad of challenging and interesting problems. Optimization models form the core of algorithms that humans use to move intercontinental cargos, transport billions of human beings, deliver better health outcomes for patients, coordinate emergency relief during disasters, design financial portfolios, and achieve bottom-line savings for corporations. Can magical powers of mathematical optimization also be used to conserve millions of animal and bird species and in the process save our planet and its biodiversity? The answer is
The Fast and the Furious: Market Design and Operations Research
Have you ever lined up in front of a store for several hours on a Black Friday? Have you ever wondered why professional Wall Street (high-frequency) traders spend billions of dollars on IT infrastructure just to get their bids processed before everyone else. The reason for both these situations is fundamentally no different. In situations like these, there is value in being the first one in line. This is the same reason that prompted the ‘Sooners’ in the early 19th century to jump the gun in the race for registering land claims in Oklahoma. But what can you do when you have so many eager participants and limited resources? Or how do you optimize the performance of a system in presence of different constraints? Beginning to sound like operations research jargon?
Operations Research v. Gerrymandering
The U.S. legal system is facing a flood of court cases that argue that certain political districts have been drawn to provide partisan advantage. Such a phenomenon is known as partisan gerrymandering, but demonstrating partisan gerrymandering has proved difficult. In the words of Justice Ginsburg, “the court...has not found a manageable, reliable measure of fairness for determining whether a partisan gerrymander violates the Constitution”. Operations research is being applied to meet this challenge.
Artificial Intelligence: The New Hype in Healthcare
The future of the healthcare industry has never been as bright as today. The application of Artificial Intelligence (AI) has made remarkable progress in its impact across a range of medical applications including drug discovery, remote patient monitoring, medical diagnostics, risk management, virtual assistants and hospital management. Improvements in accuracy and efficiency are made possible by innovations in deep neural networks and high-end computational resources in combination with increasing availability of medical data. In this report, we summarize some significant AI innovations in healthcare followed by a discussion on future challenges and opportunities.
The Longest Induced Path Problem: How Far Can Information Travel?
Imagine you posted something on social media, it may be a food review for that gorgeous restaurant you went to the other day, some brilliant ideas worth sharing or even just a cool meme that you wish everyone can see. Some of your friends shared your post and their friends shared it further...have you ever wondered how far your post could travel and who ended up seeing it? To answer this question, we wish to find the longest induced path in the social network. The longest induced path problem is to find the largest subset of nodes in a graph that gives a simple path without cycles (Johnson and Garey, 1979; Di Giacomo et al., 2016; Esperet et al., 2017). To do so, we have to consider all possible acyclic paths formed by all possible subsets of nodes in the graph. Considering its combinatorial nature, the longest induced path problem is known to be NP-hard (Johnson and Garey, 1979). Given the inherent computational complexity of the problem, the literature offers limited insight on exact solution approaches in general graphs but instead focuses on subclasses of the problem that are polynomially solvable and on tightening the bounds of the induced path length...
OR/MS Tomorrow Spotlights
If your student chapter has not used the INFORMS Speakers Program before, this article is for you! Read on and find out about the fantastic benefits this program can provide for your chapter. If your chapter has used this program before, let this article serve as an inspiration to include a speaker in your upcoming events.
YinzOR is a single-track conference that brings together students studying operations research and related fields to facilitate interaction and collaboration with peers. YinzOR came into existence in 2017, when Aleksandr Kazachkov, founding President of the CMU INFORMS Student Chapter, envisioned a “conference of the students, by the students and for the students”.