YinzOR 2017

The INFORMS student chapter at Carnegie Mellon held the first YinzOR Student Conference on August 26th to 27th. The name of the conference combines the acronym for Operations Research with “Yinzer”, which means a native or inhabitant of the city of Pittsburgh. The goal of the conference was to put together PhD students from a variety of programs related to OR, such as Computer Science, Math, Operations Management, and Operations Research at Carnegie Mellon as well as Industrial Engineering at the University of Pittsburgh. The conference program mixed talks from those departments with keynotes by successful young researchers from academia and industry, who presented their work on disjunctive programming for clustering, online data-driven algorithms for healthcare, and AI beating professional poker players. Besides bridging the gap among students in different departments, the conference also served to welcome the new cohort of PhD students.

Funding and resources for YinzOR were provided by the CMU Activities Fee and the Tepper School of Business.