Ryan, Christopher Thomas (Sauder School of Business, University of British Columbia)

Christopher Thomas Ryan
University of British Columbia
Sauder School of Business
Vancouver, British Columbia V6T 1Z2
Canada

Website: Christopher Thomas Ryan's University of British Columbia webpage

Topics

Paths to Research

This talk describes some of my learning on charting a path to a career in academic research. I explore an extended analogy between research and art, as well as talk about how to become more effective in six core research capabilities: reading, listening, creating, writing, speaking, and collaborating. The talk aims to be interactive and geared towards young researchers

Appropriate audience: PhD students, those hoping to be PhD students, and young faculty

O.R. and Video Game Design

Video games are the fastest-growing and largest sector of the entertainment industry. Video games have also been at the heart of technological innovations for decades. Dr. Christopher Ryan believes there's a largely untapped opportunity for operations research methods to study questions of game design.

Dr. Ryan will review literature on using operations research tools to study video game design and discuss four recent papers that look at four important problems in video game design: level design, world design, designing for diversity of play, and designing "boosters" in puzzle games. He will present a framework for future research in video games and an invitation for more researchers to join us.

Work is based on projects with the following co-authors: Lifei Sheng (University of Houston Clear Lake), Yifu Li (Xian Jiao Tong Liverpool), Xuying Zhao (Notre Dame), Will Ma (Columbia), Oussama Hanguir (Columbia), and Benny Wong (UBC).

Appropriate audience: PhD students, those hoping to be PhD students, and young faculty

An Overview of My Journey through Optimization

This talk aims to summarize some of my learning about optimization over 15+ years of studying the topic. The goal is to present some high level ideas of several papers, without diving too much into details. Instead, I will focus on my enthusiasm for the subject of optimization and what is has meant to me over the years. Topics include: projection, duality, moment problems, and Pareto optimality.

The talk will summarize joint work with Kipp Martin, Amitabh Basu, Matt Stern, Guanyi Wang, Xi Chen, Simai He, Bo Jiang, Teng Zhang, Yeon-Koo Che, Jinwoo Kim, and Fuhito Kojima.

Appropriate audience: PhD students, those hoping to be PhD students, and young faculty

Education and Background

• PhD, Management Science, University of British Columbia

Chris teaches at the University of British Columbia in the Sauder School of Business. His research interests include optimization (broadly defined), theoretical economics, operations management, organizational learning, and business history.