OR on Campus: Transportation Problems

Yesterday we had a great talk on some challenging problems in Transportation systems by Dr. Satish Ukkusuri from the Department of Civil Engineering here at Purdue University. Dr. Ukkusuri talked about some of his research work that deals with Network Equilibrium problems and large scale data analytics. Dr. Ukkusuri's lab has been working on some really novel methods to solve transportation related problems. They use data from Twitter and Four-Square to gather information on the status of the network in real time. He also talked about the Disaster management problem, especially in the context of Hurricane evacuation. One of his research projects involves taxi cab data analysis taken from taxi cabs running on the island of Manhattan.

Dr. Ukkusuri with INFORMS faculty advisor Dr. Brunese (L) and President Varun Ramamohan (R)

Dr. Ukkusuri nicely outlined how useful operations research and optimization techniques are in dealing with real world problems.

Convexification talk by Dr. Tawarmalani

We had a great start to the Fall 2012 INFORMS Seminar series today with Dr. Tawarmalani talking about Convexification in Mixed Integer Non-Linear programs. The callout was also a success, and I extend a warm welcome to all our new members. Here are some pictures from today's seminar.

Dr. Tawarmalani during the talk

Dr. Tawarmalani interacting with some students

Fall 2012 Callout + 1st On campus Seminar

INFORMS Purdue Chapter welcomes you to its Fall 2012 Callout on Wednesday, September 26 at KRAN 140 from 5:30 to 6:30. Pizza and soft drinks will be provided.

Along with the first annual meeting and call-out, we will also be having our first "OR on Campus" seminar given by Dr. Mohit Tawarmalani. He will talk about "Convexification in mixed-integer nonlinear programming".

Fall 2011 Callout

It's the start of a new academic year, and we'd like to welcome all the new students as well as our existing members. We kick off the activities for fall 2011 with the annual call out meeting, to be held on Thursday, September the 15th at Grissom 280 from 5 pm to 6 pm.

Be sure to drop by to find out more about what we have in store this year as well as for the free pizza!

Photos from Dr. Thiele's Seminar

Slides from Dr. Capponi's Seminar

If you would like a copy of the slides from Dr. Capponi's seminar from 9/21, please email Pat Brunese at pbrunese@purdue.edu.

Pat also has a preprint copy of the article in which some of the material (principal agent problem) from the seminar originated.

The other paper from which material was presented is available here: http://arxiv.org/abs/0812.3705. Brief industrial version appeared in Risk Magazine.

Brigo, D. and Capponi, A. (2010). Bilateral counterparty risk with application to CDSs. Risk Magazine, March 2010.

New Faculty Seminar

Purdue IE's newest operations research faculty member, Dr. Agostino Capponi, will give a seminar talk on some of his recent research.

Date: 9/21/10

Time: 6-7pm

Location: GRIS 180

Title: Risk Modeling in Financial and Economic Markets

Abstract: In this talk, I discuss the main aspects of my research dealing with stochastic risk modeling in economics and finance.

I introduce engineering techniques which can be used to price default sensitive financial contracts and outline the main difficulties of credit risk modeling, including correlation modeling and model calibration.

I then discuss the risk sharing problem in Economics, where a principal (firm) hires an agent (project manager) to run a project, and pay him a part of the proceeds as compensation. I illustrate the basic techniques used in constructing optimal contracts, which draw from results in diffusion processes theory.

Plus, there will be food!