YinzOR2022
After one year of postponement and one year of virtual conference due to Covid, the CMU INFORMS Student Chapter was very excited to host the 5th YinzOR Conference in person. YinzOR 2022 was hosted on August 26-27 at Tepper School of Business, Carnegie Mellon University. The conference attracted more than 60 attendees from various universities whose research is in Operations Research, Management Science, Industrial Engineering, and other related fields, which is a great honor and a big success. The conference consisted of three featured talks, three regular-track talks, an industry problems session, a poster competition with 11 participants, a flash talk competition with 11 participants, a few social breaks and a happy hour.
On Friday August 26, Willem-Jan van Hoeve, Carnegie Bosch Professor of Operations Research and the Senior Associate Dean of Tepper School of Business, gave opening remarks and welcomed the participants. Then one of our plenary speakers Jourdain Lamperski, who is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Industrial Engineering at the University of Pittsburgh, gave a talk about ‘Estimating the Transition Probabilities of Discrete-Time Markov Chains from Partially Observed Aggregate Data’.
Following a small group social event after Jourdain’s featured talk, Ian Zhu from UToronto presented ‘Inverse Mixed Integer Optimization: Polyhedral Insights and Trust Region Methods’ and Yatharth Dubey from Georgia Tech presented ‘A Theoretical and Computational Analysis of Full Strong-Branching’. We then held our poster session, where there were 11 participants from Northwestern University, Cornell University, McMaster University, University of Maryland, Carnegie Mellon University, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Georgia Tech, and University of Southern California. Congratulates to Nan Jiang, Neha Sharma and Billy Jin for being the top three, as well as Siddharth Prasad who was selected as the fan favorite! We wrapped up the day with a catering of dinner by a local Pittsburgh restaurant.
Saturday August 27 started with a healthy breakfast. We hosted an industry problems session where three companies spoke about key business problems that were solved using Optimization / Data Analytics. After that Chara Podimata, postdoctoral researcher at UC Berkeley and assistant professor of operations research and statistics at MIT Sloan starting July 2023, presented ‘Incentive-Aware Machine Learning for Decision Making’. The 5-Minute flash talk competition followed with 11 participants from Cornell University, UC Berkeley, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, University of Pittsburgh, MIT, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Duke University, Georgia Tech, and Northwestern University. Congratulates to Alyf Janmohamed, Neha Sharma and Hansheng Jiang for being the top three, as well as Chenghuai Li who was selected as the fan favorite!
In the afternoon, Karan Singh from Tepper School of Business, Carnegie Mellon University presented ‘Competitive Analysis and Low Regret in Online Control’, and Arthur Delarue from Georgia Tech presented ‘Reducing Marketplace Interference Bias via Shadow Prices’. Following Arthur’s talk, we had the awards ceremony for poster and flash talk competition winners. Fatma Kılınç-Karzan announced the winners and handed in their award certificates. After the closing remarks we had the great happy hour. The participants discussed academic and life with drinks and snacks in hands. At night, some of us took a tour of the beautiful city of Pittsburgh.
