YinzOR 2024

The INFORMS Student Chapter at Carnegie Mellon University hosted YinzOR 2024 on August 23-24 at Tepper School of Business, Carnegie Mellon University. This year’s conference was gently sponsored by Hexaly. The conference consisted of ten regular-track talks, a poster competition with 12 participants, a flash talk competition with 9 participants, a few interaction breaks and a happy hour. This year we had the honor of hosting more than 70 attendees. A nomination and voting process was used by the organizing committee to choose and invite excellent young researchers from various institutions. We were excited to have a diverse group of speakers from Carnegie Mellon University, Stanford University, Georgia Tech, Cornell University, Columbia University, and Hexaly. On Friday August 23, Laurence Ales, currently the Senior Associate Dean, Faculty and Research at Tepper School of Business, kicked off YinzOR with Opening Remarks. Dean’s opening remarks was followed by a featured talk by Mathieu Dahan from Georgia Tech. Professor Dahan presented his work on designing large-scale resilient relay logistics networks by locating logistics hubs to optimize resilience metrics. Following Professor Dahan’s featured talk, Woody Zhu from Carnegie Mellon University presented his work on decision rules for a quantifiable objective when there is an abundance of choices and information due to increased data availability. Following Professor Zhu’s talk, there was a short networking break in which participants had time to connect and talk about their research. After the break, Ziv Scully from Cornell University presented his work on the problem of scheduling jobs in a queueing system. After Professor Scully’s talk, Ellen Vitercik from Stanford University presented her work on online matching with graph neural networks. The flash-talk competition was held after Professor Vitercik’s talk. 9 participants gave 5 minute talks on their research. The flash talk competition had participants from Carnegie Mellon University, Cornell University, Columbia University, MIT, Georgia Institute of Technology, and University of Toronto. The panel of judges for the flash-talk competition consisted of three esteemed professors: Fatma Kilinc-Karzan, Emily Diana, Paul Gölz. Additionally, a fan favorite was voted by general attendees. The winners of the competition were Rakesh Allu (Cornell University), Man Yiu Tsang (Lehigh University), Yu Ma (MIT), and Yiling Xie (Georgia Tech). Congratulations to all winners! Continuing the tradition, we wrapped up the first day of YinzOR with a delicious dinner from Piada. The second day of YinzOR 2024, August 24, started with a healthy breakfast, and morning session speakers. In the first Saturday session of YinzOR, Rachitesh Kumar (Carnegie Mellon University), Tianyi Peng (Columbia University), and Paul Gölz (Cornell University) presented their work. Professor Kumar presented his work with the title “Strategically-Robust Bidding Algorithms for First-Price Auctions”. Professor Peng talked about his work on reevaluating A/B testing through reinforcement learning. Professor Gölz presented his work on generative social choice. Professor Gölz’s talk was followed by lunch in which attendees had the opportunity to explore restaurants around the area. After lunch, Founder and CEO of Hexaly, Fred Gardi gave a talk regarding Hexaly Optimizer, which is a new global optimization solver. We thank Gardi for his inspiring talk and contributions to the YinzOR conference! The poster competition was held after Gardi’s talk. There were 12 posters from Carnegie Mellon University, University of Pittsburgh, Columbia University, Georgia Institute of Technology, Harvard University, and University of Washington. The panel of judges for the poster competition consisted of three esteemed professors: Alan Scheller-Wolf, Ellen Vitercik, and Tianyi Peng. Additionally, a fan favorite was also voted by general attendees. The winners of the competition were Priyank Agrawal (Columbia University), Tianjiao Li (Georgia Tech), Qing Ye (Georgia Tech), and Qiqi Hao (University of Pittsburgh). Congratulations to all winners! Congratulations to all winners! After the poster competition, Jiaoyang Li (Carnegie Mellon University) talked about her research on large-scale multi-robot coordination. Following Professor Li’s talk, Bryan Wilder (Carnegie Mellon University) presented his work on the increasing role of machine learning on public health, specifically allocating limited resources under uncertainty. Following Professor Wilder’s talk, we had the awards ceremony for poster and flash talk competition winners. Professor Fatma Kılınç-Karzan announced the winners and handed in their award certificates. After the closing remarks, the conference ended with the most important event of all: Happy Hour. It was held in the biggest balcony of the Tepper Quad, where the participants enjoyed a nice view of the beautiful city of Pittsburgh. As the INFORMS Student Chapter, we thank all the speakers and attendees for attending the YinzOR Conference 2024. We look forward to seeing you all next year! YinzOR 2024 team of organizers: Vrishabh Patil (Co-Chair), Jody Zhu (Co-Chair), H. Satyam Verma (Webmaster Chair), Lin An (Speaker Co-Chair), Siyue Liu (Speaker Co-Chair), Macarena Navarro (Marketing Co-Chair), Sebastian Vasquez (Marketing Co-Chair), Olha Silina (Flash Talk and Poster Session Co-Chair), Wenbin Zhou (Flash Talk and Poster Session Co-Chair), Anthony Karahalios (Sponsor Chair).