Preference for the fellowships is given to students choosing the new Systems Design track, which incorporates two courses from mechanical engineering – robotics and mechatronics, in addition to a new ISyE course on supply chain systems design. The purpose of the track is to prepare students for roles in supply chain facilities' engineering and design, as well as a broader range of supply chain systems design roles.

Priority is also given to underrepresented minorities and female students. Amazon is supporting ISyE and the SCL to reach out to students in transfer programs with historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs) or schools that are otherwise are majority minority.

About the Fellowship Recipients

Gil Malengreaux, who hails from Belgium, did both his undergraduate – in electromechanical engineering – and master's work – in industrial engineering and operations research (IEOR) – at Ghent University. He is in ISyE's in the Master of Supply Chain Engineering (MS SCE) program on a Fulbright scholarship to the U.S.

Malengreaux said that he chose the supply chain engineering program because ISyE has one of the top programs internationally. "With a generic, broad master's degree in IEOR, I wanted to learn how I can apply these techniques within a supply chain setting," he explained. "My IEOR background provides me a multidisciplinary view on businesses and industry, but I believe that there's so much exciting innovation in the world of logistics and fulfilment, that highly specialized profiles are indispensable to optimize these systems, and make them more efficient, durable, and sustainable. The sustainability aspect is what really interests me."

Angela Moore completed her bachelor's degree in industrial engineering from Northeastern University in Boston, MA.

"I'm fascinated by the interconnectivity of complex systems within the global supply chain," Moore said. "From my experience in production, inventory management, system implementation, and procurement, I've seen how a small decision in one department can have a large impact on the entire system. I'd like to use my industry experience with the supply chain engineering curriculum to help strategically plan out future supply chain systems.

"When I graduate from the MS SCE program, I want design innovative supply chain systems that reduce waste while being agile and responsive. I'd like to work with a group of people that are interested in challenging current processes."

Kiara Moore received her bachelor's degree in computer science with a mathematics minor from Atlanta, GA's Spelman College. Spelman is an all-women's college and the No. 1-ranked HBCU.

She selected Georgia Tech for her master's degree because "it has been a dream school for me. Georgia Tech is known for educating some of the top professionals in the industry. Not only is Tech ranked highly for engineering, ISyE is the No. 1 school in its field.

"Further," she noted, "ISyE offers programs that partner with different companies to provide real-world experience. Without hesitation I knew Tech and ISyE would be the best choice for me."

Following this dream education experience, Moore's dream job will be working on the business side of supply chain engineering.

Krithika Srinivasan comes to ISyE from India, where she received her undergraduate degree in mechanical engineering from Vellore Institute of Technology (VIT). Srinivasan said that "VIT is known worldwide for its cosmopolitan atmosphere and its beautiful campus. I enjoyed my four years there, where I made the best of friends and worked with some of the best faculty.

"I believe supply chain engineering plays an important role in any industry, as it involves optimization of processes, customer satisfaction, and employee welfare," she explained. "It is central to the holistic development of a company, as well as the idea that a small, seemingly insignificant change can change the fortunes of a company. Also, any supply chain connects people around the world, giving it a global reach that enriches numerous cultures."

Her dream job, she says, "is one that would let me be creative and provide solutions to problems that would result in the satisfaction of the end user. Supply chain engineering brings together my passion for engineering as well as my problem solving skills, and I hope to help as many people as I can."

For more information on ISyE's MS SCE program, visit https://www.isye.gatech.edu/academics/masters/supply-chain-engineering.

For questions or if you are interested in applying for an Amazon Fellowship, visit https://www.scl.gatech.edu/outreach/amazonfellow.

The pair submitted their proposal, “Strategic Investment to Scale-up Aviation Biofuel,” to the Climate CoLab’s Aviation contest category. They proposed that one large country (the U.S., China, or Brazil) or coordinated region (e.g., the EU) intensely ramp up aviation biofuel production, along with associated coproducts such as diesel fuel, to a level of about 120 million tons of biomass by the year 2030. They specifically focused on the feasibility of China to contribute to this initiative.

Emphasizing technology development for aviation biofuel within a particular country would result in gaining expertise in the most efficient pathway. Plausible ways to develop a stable supply and demand for biofuel include the following:

• Collaborating with neighboring countries to establish an efficient supply chain.
• Working with suppliers and airlines that are taking initiatives to use biofuel.
• A common fuel distribution system can be established in the airports of China, similar to the bioports implemented in Amsterdam, Holland and Oslo, Norway. This way all the operators flying into these airports will be refueled by biofuel.
• With the European Union including the aviation industry in its emission trading system since 2012, a strategic alignment could be made between the EU and China to substantiate the investment.

Arulselvan and Thomas’s proposal was particularly commended by the contest judges for its potential impact to considerably reduce carbon dioxide emissions.

To learn more about the pair’s proposal, read here: http://bit.ly/2cJQPjU.

Watch a video about the pair’s work here: https://youtu.be/un9Ve3V5w8M.

About Valerie Thomas and Suriya Arulselvan

Suriya Arulselvan is a process modeling engineer at Aspen Technology in Bedford, MA. She has a Master of Science in chemical engineering from Georgia Tech, and a Bachelor of Technology in chemical engineering from the National Institute of Technology, Tiruchipappalli.

Valerie Thomas is the Anderson Interface Professor of Natural Systems in ISyE, with a joint appointment in the School of Public Policy. Her research interests are energy and materials efficiency, sustainability, industrial ecology, technology assessment, international security, and science and technology policy. Current research projects include the environmental impacts of biofuels and electricity system policy and planning.

About the Climate CoLab

The goal of the Climate CoLab is to harness the collective intelligence of thousands of people from all around the world to address global climate change.

Inspired by systems like Wikipedia and Linux, the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence has developed this crowdsourcing platform where people work with experts and each other to create, analyze, and select detailed proposals for what to do about climate change.

By constructively engaging a broad range of scientists, policy makers, business people, investors, and concerned citizens, the hope is that the Climate CoLab will help to develop, and gain support for, climate change plans that are better than any that would have otherwise been developed.

Anyone can join the Climate CoLab community and participate. Community members are invited to submit and comment on proposals outlining ideas for what they think should be done about climate change. In some contests, members create proposals for specific kinds of actions such as generating electric power with fewer emissions or changing social attitudes about climate change. In other contests, members combine ideas from many other proposals to create integrated climate action plans for a country, a group of countries, or the whole world. Experts evaluate the entries and pick finalists, and then both experts and community members select the most promising proposals.

“Systems have multiple components, such as organisms, resources, information, and activities, with various interactions among those components and the environment in which they operate as well as other systems,” said Keskinocak. “A narrow or myopic view, which focuses on one part of a system and ignores how that part interacts with the others, could not only lead to suboptimal solutions but also cause more harm than good in some cases.”

Keskinocak is also the Co-director of Georgia Tech’s Center for Health & Humanitarian Systems (CHHS) along with Julie Swann, Harold R. and Mary Anne Nash Professor. The Center, founded in 2007 by Keskinocak, Swann, and and Özlem Ergun, now a professor at Northeastern University, was elevated to an Interdisciplinary Research Center at Georgia Tech in 2015.

In 2014, the Center changed its name from the Center for Health & Humanitarian Logistics to the Center for Health & Humanitarian Systems to better reflect the Center’s focus on systems.

“Humanitarian logistics is traditionally associated with procurement, transportation, and distribution operations for disaster relief or longer-term development activities,” said Keskinocak. “In addition to our ongoing focus on logistics, we place a strong emphasis on incorporating systems transformation for complex, long-term challenges.”

The Center has three primary areas of activity: education, outreach, and innovative solutions and research.

Keskinocak and team work with a variety of external organizations on addressing complex problems. They start by focusing on the symptoms, quantifying them to the extent possible, exploring possible root causes, developing potential solution approaches and estimating their impact under various scenarios, and then making recommendations.

“Our goal is to apply our expertise to help our partners improve the efficiency and effectiveness of their organizations, leading to a positive impact on people’s lives,” said Keskinocak.

Depending on the application, Keskinocak’s work has led to different outcomes, such as hands-on decision support tools or policy-level recommendations. For example, in her work on modeling infectious diseases, such as cholera or pandemic flu, the models and analysis lead to “recommendations on the most effective intervention strategies or the allocation of scarce resources such as vaccines,” she said.

She also has worked with various hospital systems where multiple units interact with one another, for operational decisions such as staff scheduling or bed assignments.

At the individual — or patient — level, ISyE methods are used in medical decision making related to screening, diagnosis, or treatment. Examples include assessing the risk of infection in an organ transplant and the tradeoff of receiving a risky organ versus staying on the transplant list and prenatal screening for Down syndrome.

The projects utilize different methods, e.g., a combination of optimization, simulation, and statistics, but they generally follow a system’s approach focusing on the allocation of scarce resources for better outcomes, or decision support with the goal of improving health outcomes for individuals and populations.

In addition to lecture courses, Keskinocak regularly teaches project courses such as the undergraduate-level Senior Design, with an increasing number of projects being focused on health and humanitarian applications, and the master’s level Health Systems Practice, where several successful projects such as the Workforce Allocation Optimization Tool have been initiated.

The CHHS team’s educational offerings extend beyond the degree programs, and include a professional education certification in Health & Humanitarian Supply Chain Management. Participants in the program, who are active practitioners in health and humanitarian operations, come from all over the world — from non-governmental organizations, government, and industry.

“The knowledge sharing and conversations in these courses are extremely interesting and lively thanks to the experience and multiple perspectives of our participants,” said Keskinocak.

The CHHS team hosts an annual international conference on Health & Humanitarian Logistics. The conference was founded because they saw a dire need for the often siloed worlds of health and humanitarian organizations to be in conversation with each other, especially since an increasing number of emergencies affect wide areas.

The conference rotates around the world. The 2015 conference was held in Johannesburg, South Africa. David Sarley, a senior program officer at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation commented that the conference “creates space for bigger conversations and dialogue.”

The 2016 conference was held in Atlanta with over 200 participants from 27 different countries around the world who engaged in dialogue about challenges facing the global health and humanitarian sectors, and successful models of organizational collaboration and supply chain practices to strengthen health and humanitarian systems. Speakers and participants came from 115 different organizations across the private sector, non-governmental organizations, academia, and government.

Savelsbergh notes that “even though GrubHub can no longer be viewed as a start-up company, it still feels and operates as a start-up company. That is, there is a ‘can-do’ attitude, and all challenges are seen as opportunities. There is a constant flow of ideas on how to possibly extend offerings, how to possibly improve service – both to restaurants and to diners – and how to best get things done.”

About the collaboration, Savelsbergh explains, “GrubHub is trying to revolutionize meal delivery, both in terms of their offerings as well as in terms of the scale of their operations – ultimately wanting to provide service in all major U.S. cities. The highly dynamic nature of their business is something rarely seen in other delivery operations and creates a great environment for researchers to develop and test new delivery optimization ideas, which is one of my primary research interests.”

There will be no retirement celebration honoring Christopher and her many contributions to the School. When the offer was made for such a celebration, Christopher requested instead that the funds be directed to support a promising ISyE undergraduate student in need of financial assistance. ISyE doubled the funds for the establishment of the Christopher Scholarship, which is providing critical resources for Donte Preston, a junior hailing from Dallas, Texas.

“This is a perfect way to retire. My family struggled financially, and I wanted to help someone who faced similar circumstances. I can’t think of a nicer way to celebrate my tenure at Georgia Tech,” said Christopher.

Recently Preston took a break from studying for exams to meet with Christopher before the end of the semester. He explained that he had always planned to stay in Texas for college — until he visited Georgia Tech.

“I loved it from the moment I stepped on campus,” Preston said. While it was a tough decision to attend an out-of-state university, he was “convinced that my investment in my education would be returned in the future,” and he has since set out to be the best industrial engineer he can be. Beyond studying and his involvement with organizations like the Georgia Tech Society of Black Engineers and the Student Alumni Association, Preston shared his interests and experiences with Christopher, discussing how he likes to spend his free time (reading) and what superhero he would be (Batman, because he doesn’t have superpowers and must rely on his brain to help other people).  

Describing how he felt when he learned he had been chosen as the recipient of the Christopher Scholarship, Preston said, “I was not expecting it at all. Receiving the scholarship was the assurance I needed. I can’t express how grateful I am.”

“Because food supply chains are natural targets, one of the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) key priority areas is food systems,” said Erera. “Everyone eats. And the food delivery system is thought to be a compelling target for a terrorist attack that could lead to large numbers of sicknesses and fatalities, and could shatter people’s confidence in the food supply.”

Working with the DHS’s Food Protection and Defense Institute (FPDI) at the University of Minnesota, White and Erera have developed a model for countering an intelligent adversary who seeks to use a food supply chain as a means of delivering a biological or chemical toxin to the public-at-large, potentially leading to widespread illness and death.

“As a terrorist weapon, the idea of [contamination in the food system] is obviously one that can be quite powerful,” continued Erera. “You don’t want to worry about your food.

“This is something important that’s been on the minds of DHS for many years, and certainly since 9/11. Therefore, DHS prioritized food defense.”

White and Erera’s model is one of risk assessment and mitigation. It differs from what they call static models in that their model assumes the adversary — or would-be terrorist— is intelligent and adaptive.

“In our model, we have an adversary who is watching any defensive move to protect the food supply chain and is reacting and adapting accordingly,” explained White. “Traditional measures of risk don’t take such behavior into consideration.”

The risk model that the pair has developed assumes that because the adversary is intelligent and adaptive, he will change attack strategies or defensive postures over time, while the supply chain owner is doing likewise — what White described as a “cat-and-mouse game.”

The gaming aspect of the model involves both of the players — the adversaries and those who would thwart them — making the best decisions possible without knowing exactly what the other is doing. White and Erera apply an optimization framework to model how the players participate in the system over time and assess a related measure of risk.

It’s almost like a chess match: How do you choose the best way to act based on what your opponent does? However, in this case, you only have incomplete or partial knowledge of what your opponent is doing — “incomplete observations,” as White put it.

White and Erera have worked with FPDI for a decade and during that time have created different case studies to test their risk model. One such study involves feral swine and foot-and-mouth disease.

The wild swine, which could be infected with foot-and- mouth disease (intentionally or naturally), can then infect domestic herds — even when separated by fences — and a big outbreak of the illness could adversely affect the U.S. pork industry.

White said, “Feral herds have easy access to domestic herds and hence can serve as a way of infecting domestic herds with a variety of diseases, so there is quite a bit of concern about risks due to the intentional contamination of feral herds with foot-and-mouth disease.”

White pointed out that the model “is a framework, so it morphs with the application. Cargo theft is another application.” But even in this application, food security is still a concern: The product stolen most often is food. He continued, “Food can be stolen, contaminated, and sold on the gray market.”

White and Erera both emphasize that despite how it may sound, this risk assessment is not in any way simple. One of the innovations they’ve developed, according to Erera, “is embedding sequential stochastic optimization problems inside game theoretical decision models that have been around for a long time.

“Once optimal decision policies are determined, then you can think of it as a simulation,” Erera said. “Both of these players are playing this game optimally over time: One is trying to maximize the impact of attacks on the system; the other is trying both to balance the risk of an attack with maintaining productivity of the food supply chain. We simulate how the two opponents behave assuming that they’re going to behave near-optimally.

“And then we see how risky the system is under those settings, or decide whether the defender can take different actions, because they’re going to try some mitigation strategies. How much does that reduce these measures of risk? That’s basically how this model works.”

Bill George (BSIE 64, Honorary Ph.D. 08), former CEO of Medtronic, is Senior Fellow at Harvard Business School specializing in developing authentic leaders. His wife, Dr. Penny George, is a leader in the national movement to transform medicine and health care through the principles and practices of integrative medicine. Together, they founded the George Family Foundation in 1994 to support programs they are passionate about and that transform lives by changing the systems affecting those lives for the better. Their foundation focuses on three primary areas: Penny’s passion for integrative health and healing; Bill’s passion for authentic leadership, and a shared passion for community.

“To see a need, a need that connects with something we understand and can bring resources to make it happen brings us pure joy,” said Penny.

The Georges, who divide their time between Minneapolis, Minneapolis and Avon, Colorado, also support Georgia Tech at the Institute level through the William W. George International Study Abroad Scholarships, the George Family Foundation Women in Engineering Leadership Initiative in the College of Engineering, and several programs in the Stewart School of ISyE, including the George Family Fellowships, the William W. George Chair Endowment in Health Systems, and general program support for health systems.

What motivated you to start the George Family Foundation?

BILL: In 1994, I was with Medtronic, and I could see that our stock was going up and our future looked good. When Penny and I looked ahead at our income, we decided to set aside a significate amount to give back to society. We always believed in philanthropy, and creating the George Family Foundation enabled us to significantly increase our charitable giving well above what we were able to do before. However, it wasn’t until 1998 that we went from what you would call checkbook philanthropy into a well- managed family foundation. That’s when Penny took it over and put some focused leadership into it. At first, she hired an outside firm to support us. And then we moved to building our own foundation staff. We are really excited about the development and growth of this venture.

Bill, authentic leadership is currently your life’s work and one focus of your foundation. Why have you chosen to devote so much of your attention to this issue?

BILL: When I completed my time at Medtronic, I took some time off to take a hard look at what it means to be a good leader. I felt that the world was not being well-served by the current theories of leadership, and I wanted to look at the deeper side of leadership. During that examination, I realized we could empower many more leaders if we allowed and encouraged people to be themselves so that their leadership came from within.

This starts by examining your character, your values, your life stories, and especially your crucibles, which are the trials and tribulations you have faced. And that is the authentic you. In 2003, I wrote the book, Authentic Leadership. That led to new theories of leadership which were validated in 2007 with an in-depth leadership study we conducted at the Harvard Business School, the largest study ever done on leaders. I am very pleased with the progress that has been made in the last 13 years since I wrote Authentic Leadership.

What is one key area in the world of leadership that you hope will receive attention in the next two to five years?

BILL: I think it will be on how we gain self-awareness. The Oracle of Delphi told us four thousand years ago to “know thyself.” But very little work has been done on how to do this.

Our research at Harvard and my work shows that knowing yourself starts with your life story — especially the most difficult times you’ve had, because that is when you realize who the real you is. The key to emotional intelligence is self-awareness, which in turn can open up your capacity to be a good leader. Without a high level of emotional intelligence, one cannot become an authentic leader. But we have to learn how to do that.

There are wonderful opportunities for re- searchers to look at how we gain self-awareness. I’ve been working on this a lot, and I hope more scholars will start looking at how we become more self-aware. It is a life skill that can be developed.

What is one thing that we all could do to start becoming more self-aware?

BILL: I’ll give you three things. First, deeply explore your own life story — especially your crucibles — in order to understand who you are and where you have come from. Beyond that, adopt a daily introspective practice. In our 24/7 world with smartphones, social media, and so much going on, we need to take at least 20 minutes every day to do some form of reflective practice. I’ve meditated for the last 41 years, but there are many other ways to have a reflective practice. It can be through prayer, keeping a journal, sitting in a quiet place and reflecting, or going for a long walk, to name a few. And finally, I would add the importance of getting honest feedback from people you trust so you can understand how you are interacting with other people and the impact you are having on them.

Most ISyE graduates end up in leadership positions of one kind or another. What advice can you offer them on how to become the best leaders they can aspire to be?

BILL: Find an environment that is nourishing, and then jump in and ask for leadership opportunities. Get into a leadership role as soon as possible. Don’t wait for someone to tap you on the shoulder. Start leading where you are with your peers, and become that informal leader who makes things happen. Executives are always looking for people like that who show promise. And just as important, learn how to collaborate with your teammates because this is an essential skill in leadership.

I recently learned that you have both a 20-year-old and a 30-year-old mentor. Could you speak to having such young mentors, and to the importance of being a mentor as well as a mentee throughout life?

BILL: I believe in reverse mentoring. That means having mentors that are considerably younger than you are who can help you understand the younger generation/employees. My 30-year- old mentor helps me with all my social media. He also worked with me on my newest book, Discover Your True North. My 20-year-old mentor is a young man from Harvard. He and I have worked together for a little over a year, and I have learned a lot about millennials from him. I also have a couple dozen millennial mentees, but to have someone mentor me on digital media and to learn the hopes, dreams, and passions of millennials has given me a deeper understanding of this generation.

Penny, integrative health is one focus of the George Family Foundation. What is it about this area that captured your attention?

PENNY: I was diagnosed with breast cancer in 1996. It was through this personal experience that I became interested in different approaches to healing. At that time in medicine, the focus was on the disease and the body part. As I went through the process, I thought that seemed misguided. We come into a disease state, as with anything else, as a whole human being— connected in mind, body, and spirit. Not to acknowledge that we can call on all those resources to heal seemed shortsighted to me. I realized I needed to do something. I’m a doctor’s kid, and I’m accustomed to taking responsibility for myself. Something contributed to me getting cancer — it did not just come out of the blue. What could I do to prevent this from potentially coming back again? And if I couldn’t prevent it, how could I make my life such that I could feel that this life was a good one, and the illness served me in some way?

Those were my personal objectives as I went through my own healing process which included assembling a team of healing professionals — what was referred to then as alternative approaches. Now it is referred to as integrative medicine. People don’t want just traditional medicine or just the alternative approaches, they want the best of both. They want the integrative approach — something that would give you the chance to have optimal wellness and well-being.

My family was loaded with cancer, but no one had ever talked to me in my medical appointments about what could be done to prevent it because people did not believe you could. Now we know 80 percent of cancer is largely preventable; it is lifestyle related. That is the gist of how I became so passionate about integrative health care.

What is one key area of health care that you hope will receive attention in the next two to five years, and why?

PENNY: I would like to see health care institutions partner with individuals/patients wherever they are in their health journey and start focusing on the benefits of self-care, which is the true primary care. What we do for ourselves is just as important as what the health care system has to offer. Medicine certainly has something to offer, but the primary thing is what we are doing for ourselves to live optimally.

Is self-care the same as preventive care?

PENNY: In medicine, preventive care is getting the colonoscopy, mammogram, etc. It’s more about looking for disease. My notion of self-care is all those things that an individual can do for themselves — eating well, exercising, reducing stress. For example, if someone has gastrointestinal issues, what if the first approach was to try an elimination diet as they waited to come in for their appointment to see if their diet was causing inflammation — instead of going in for an appointment and being prescribed pharmaceuticals without further investigation into why?

As Greg Plotnikoff, one of my heroes in integrative medicine, said, “Fundamentals first, pharmaceuticals second.” Don’t go straight to a drug; figure out what is going on underneath first. We are too quick to jump to drugs. The worst case of this is the opioid epidemic in the country.

What word of advice can you offer to our students and young alumni who are heading into the world of health care?

PENNY: I would encourage them to consider researching integrative medicine and health and the challenges this poses for the current system. Our health care is moving in that direction already. We need to find optimal ways for a team-based approach that looks at the whole person to work in today’s system. Also, consider researching how we introduce a shift in consciousness so the patient/individual steps up and starts practicing self-care.

As part of your philanthropic endeavors, you have funded an endowed chair position in the Stewart School of ISyE, as well as student fellowships. Why?

BILL: I think the next big frontier for ISyE lies in health care. By applying systems theory and application to the U.S. health care system, Georgia Tech can make breakthroughs in the health care delivery system and in improving patient outcomes more efficiently.

Pinar Keskinocak is the perfect leader to hold the William W. George Chair in Health Systems. She is a real star, and we are fortunate to have her at Georgia Tech and particularly in ISyE. She really knows how to take an operations research and management science approach and apply it to health and humanitarian systems. This is exactly what is needed in the area of health care, and we are so pleased to support her work. We have an enormous opportunity at Georgia Tech to do breakthrough work in the field of health. I hope other alumni will continue to support these kinds of activities so we can make Georgia Tech a global leader in the health systems approach.

PENNY: The student fellowships we support enable ISyE students to work on these difficult health care challenges with Pinar and her team. We are thrilled to be associated with that and putting some wind under their wings.

Sheereen Brown (BSIE 12, MSHS 14) and Monica Villarreal (Ph.D. IE 15) were both George Fellows. Villarreal helped develop a workforce allocation tool that enables developing countries to deploy their health care workers in the most optimal manner. Brown is now working with the Task Force for Global Health to implement it in Tanzania and Zimbabwe. What is it like hearing about some of the students you have supported?

BILL: They have done some amazing work. We need more health care workers in the developing world to come up with approaches to get and maintain health care workers in these areas.

Someone told me once that I get a vicarious pleasure from the accomplishment of others, and indeed I do. It is a great pleasure to hear what our graduates are doing and to read about this kind of work. It inspires me to work with more of them. But I hope it also inspires younger students to work on projects that can make a difference in the world as well.

You also have funded the William W. George Family International Study Abroad Scholarships at the Institute level. What motivated you to make this gift, and what do you think the impact is on the students who go abroad as a result of to your generosity?

BILL: Many Tech undergrads cannot afford to participate in study abroad programs, which would open their eyes to the world and broaden their education. That’s why we created the William W. George International Study Abroad Scholarships to enable 50-plus Tech students to travel and study abroad each year. Meeting with them each year after they return and hearing their stories brings home just how transformative these experiences are in their lives.

If you had a crystal ball in which you could see the future, what problems do you think industrial engineers will be working on five to 10 years from now?

BILL: The future in solving any problem will be collaborative, bringing in people across disciplinary lines. We need to look at problems from a systems point of view. The great thinkers of the world will be systems thinkers. We are in great need of that systems mentality. Health care, in particular, is crying out for a systems approach. The Stewart School of ISyE is uniquely positioned to bring this capability of systems thinking into the health care arena. Health care is one of the most pressing challenges we have.

Speed Round

What are you currently reading?

PENNY: American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America by Colin Woodward.

BILL: The Art of Authenticity: Tools to Become an Authentic Leader and Your Best Self by Karissa Thacker.

What is one of the best meals you’ve ever had?

BILL: Enjoying a grilled leg of lamb, some vegetables, and wine with friends while sitting in our garden overlooking the lake and watching the full moon come up. This was the perfect evening and a perfect meal.

PENNY: I had a seafood stew the other night at Chimborazo, an Ecuadorian restaurant in Minneapolis, and it was just wonderful.

What is one of your favorite travel spots?

PENNY: Africa. I love going to Africa. The first time I traveled to Africa was 1967. I went with my parents on a photographic safari to Uganda and Kenya. Seeing the vast plain and the herd of animals was something that blew my mind.

BILL: I have many favorite travel spots. If I had to say one, I would say going to Colorado where we have a second home and go hiking in the mountains. The most challenging and rugged hike is Mount of the Holy Cross, which is just over 14,000 feet, and a very spiritual place for me.

What is your favorite leisure activity?

BILL: It would be a tie among skiing, hiking, and horseback riding.

PENNY: Horseback riding in wide open spaces.

Describe a perfect Sunday morning.

PENNY: Reading the New York Times and the Minneapolis Star Tribune with a latte, and then going to church.

BILL: A perfect Sunday morning would be going for a walk around the lake by our house, reading the New York Times, and then going to church for a nice service with beautiful music and spiritual uplift.

This past spring, as a part of the Georgia Tech-Lorraine (GTL) study abroad program in Metz, France, I traveled to eight European countries in five months. The travel, while interesting, wasn’t the most impactful part of my study abroad experience — rather, it was the friendships I made. Even when checking off bucket-list destinations, the experience always resonated more when I went with friends.

Meaningful, too, were the experiences that stretched my intellectual boundaries. Over the course of the semester, I studied and worked harder than I ever had before. I helped make an app with coding experience from CS 1301, wrote for the official GTL blog, and served as vice president for the Bureau des Étudiants (Resident Housing Association). My classmates and I even volunteered at a former holding camp in World War II, Fort Queuleu, where we repaired the historic iron gate and mingled with fellow volunteers from Metz.

As a result of this semester, I have become more confident in my presentation skills, reconsidered preconceived notions on politics, welfare, and the intricacies of financial markets, and changed my priorities. I’ve seen the beauty of people around me, as I saw complete strangers on trains help my friends out for no reason other than being kind.

When signing up for my semester abroad, I thought I’d find inspiration in grandiose buildings and seeing renowned works of art and architecture, but really, I found it in the people around me and in new experiences. And now that I am back in the States, my experience has afforded me the opportunity to reflect on what success means to me and the road ahead.

For me, success is rooted in happiness — being able to look back at my life and sigh contentedly. For some, happiness is etched in a fire-engine red Ferrari, but mine rests on one key pursuit: balance. I’m happiest — and most successful — when all the different aspects of my life reach an equilibrium point. So success is never a stagnant accomplishment, but rather evolves as life does.

This includes facets like personal health and well-being, relationships with people I love, achieving my goals and satisfaction in academics and career, volunteering in the community, and enjoying leisure. It’s hard to live a life teetering toward imbalance: If I don’t spend enough time with people I love, then I’m unhappy; if I don’t spend enough time studying for that ISyE 3232 test, then I’ll also be unhappy once T-Square loads the grades.

Balance in all pursuits is tricky to maintain because some- times life gets in the way. As an ISyE student at Georgia Tech, the demands of classes can make balance even more difficult. The thought of achieving my academic goals — a degree from the most prestigious industrial engineering program in the country at a reputable Institute that I love — fuels my quest for a purposeful career.

Here at Tech, I am fortunate in many ways. Beyond exemplary academics, Georgia Tech tries to make the pursuit of balance realizable with events, clubs, and programs that create opportunities to expand horizons. The Institute of Industrial and System Engineers, the Society of Women Engineers, Energy Club, and French Club have all brought new perspectives, responsibilities, and experiences. And Georgia Tech’s International Plan, a degree designation that encourages a global mindset in studies and careers, is the reason I had the opportunity to go abroad in the first place.

Georgia Tech is a place you come to be successful — not just in school, and not just in finding your perfect job, but in defining your terms of success and pursuing them. For me, that’s the most valuable part of attending this Institute and studying industrial engineering: I’m pursuing the balance I need while at the same time earning a degree I’m passionate about, and that makes me very happy.

Clean water and sanitation for the developing country of Tanzania are particularly on the mind of ISyE alumna Tracy Hawkins (BSIE 85). Hawkins is the face of SAFE Water Now (SWN), a U.S.-based nonprofit organization providing expertise, services, and resources to solve the problem of unsafe drinking water in Tanzania, all on a completely volunteer basis. This includes her role as the executive director for the organization, in which she handles the business development of SWN — everything from operations and communications to fundraising. “I wear a lot of hats,” she said.

The goals of SWN are to both raise awareness for the need for clean water and to raise funds for ceramic pot filters that can provide clean water for a Tanzanian family for up to five years at a total cost of $40. To accomplish this, Hawkins works alongside her partner, Mesiaki Yonas Kimirei (who prefers to go by “Kim”).

Kim runs SWN’s sister organization, Safe Water Ceramics of East Africa (SWCEA), from just outside Arusha, Tanzania’s second-largest city. SWCEA’s employees actually make the ceramic pot filters.

Hawkins described this pursuit of clean water for the people in East Africa as a deeply felt mission: “I got involved in this without really knowing exactly what I was getting into. I got really scared because the venture grew bigger than I anticipated, and it was more important than I realized.

“So I struggled with continuing to do this work or not, because it’s very complicated. But I just had to keep doing it. It’s a passion, it’s a calling, and because it’s so fundamental to all life, to all people, to children, to the most vulnerable. I feel like it overrides religion and politics and gender – you can’t segregate our society when it comes to water.”

The development of SWN and SWCEA has something of a winding history: Hawkins was visiting Tanzania in 2005, when she collaborated with local potters to develop handcrafted ceramic souvenirs to sell to tourists coming to the country. Hawkins was looking into fundraising possibilities for this venture when she came across the ceramic pot water filter promoted by Potters for Peace, another U.S.-based nonprofit that produces ceramic pot filters in Central America.

Remembering that she had to drink bottled water on her Tanzanian trip, Hawkins was struck with the idea that a similar endeavor could be started in that country. She took the idea to the group she was working with in Tanzania and the rest, as they say, was history: “My current partner, Kim, said ‘We have to do this.’ And so we did, and we’ve been doing it now for 10 years.”

On a family property near Arusha, close to the main road, SWCEA has built its ceramic factory. The factory produces both ceramic pot filters and traditional pots. Making and selling the pots has allowed the factory to be sustainable during the filter’s development.

According to Kim, there are several challenges to producing the filters, which are made with clay, sawdust, and colloidal silver. Potential obstacles include a minimal consumer market for the filters — most are purchased through donations; the difficulty of filter delivery to customers throughout East Africa; flooding, which has damaged production machines and materials; and an unreliable source of electricity, which can cause production to lag.

Additionally, slow production is a problem. Right now, 500 filters are produced each month, and that’s where Georgia Tech’s Engineering for Social Innovation Center (ESI) comes in. ESI matches students with real-world projects for corporations and nonprofit agencies. All projects aim to improve the lives of the underprivileged domestic population or people at the bottom of the pyramid in the developing world.

Three separate ESI teams are working to make SAFE Water Now’s process for creating the filters more efficient. One group is creating a test tube incubator that tests the water before and after it is filtered, by adding a bacterial agent and heating it to an exact temperature. A second group is building a drying tent for the filters that is made out of inexpensive, lightweight, readily available materials. To deal with the issue of inconsistent electricity, and to power the incubator and the drying tent, another team is developing a solar-powered generator. With these three innovations in place, which are all still in the prototyping phase, the outcome of these ESI projects will reduce bottlenecks in the process to produce filters at the current capacity of 500 units per month.

“This project was the biggest highlight of my college career. We all want to be able to help, but we don’t always know how. ESI made taking my skills and applying them to something meaningful an amazing, effortless, and natural process,” said Meriem Guehaiz (BSIE 16), member of the SAFE Water Now incubator team.

SWCEA has, fortunately, also found a unique solution to distributing the ceramic pot filters: via the safari circuit. Hawkins said, “A large safari company that works in Tanzania and other countries – Overseas Adventure Travel [OAT] – brings their tourists for a cultural safari to our factory. Afterward, the tourists journey to the most rural locations, where they are able to donate filters to rural people living without safe water. OAT tourists have the opportunity to actually participate in delivering safe water to the local people living on the Serengeti, Ngorongoro Crater, or along the Great Rift Valley — a life-changing experience for everyone.”

In contrast to Kim’s list of very specific and immediate challenges, Hawkins described the challenges — which are two-fold — of their joint venture a little differently.

First, there’s an educational component to using the ceramic pot filters that must be bridged. Hawkins said this involves “helping [the users] understand that water is making them sick and what they can do to prevent getting sick. It means helping them achieve simple goals, such as handwashing and treating their water. Beyond that — once the people we’re serving feel better and see progress — we can talk about things like sanitation and girls’ menstrual needs. [But] water has to come first.”

Second, there’s a cultural component to figuring out how to scale up and enlarge SWN/SWCEA from a business perspective. Hawkins noted that the two organizations are working with a social enterprise incubator and accelerator called Anza that is helping her figure out how to overcome cultural challenges.

“For instance, we really need consumer micro-credit to go to scale,” she explained. “Think about going to Sears and buying a refrigerator, where it’s easy to get credit.” It’s not currently possible for people to buy the pot filters on a credit system like someone would be accustomed to in the U.S.

Further, Hawkins and Kim want the ceramic pot filter to become an aspirational product, something that appeals to the middle and upper classes in Tanzania, which will increase the filter’s desirability.

“So as you can see,” Hawkins added, “This is using every single bit of IE systems knowledge that I could possibly drum up. This whole project is a systems engineering project. It’s different from a systems engineering project that you would find in an industrialized country.

“I would say the biggest difference is the need for flexibility — to not plan too far ahead. As a matter of fact, the risks are so high working in this environment, you have to be able to flow with whatever’s going on.”

Pinar Keskinocak, ISyE’s William W. George Chair and Co-founder and Co-director of the Center for Health & Humanitarian Systems at Georgia Tech, is on SWN’s advisory board. She has helped Hawkins with SWN’s development and confirmed the benefits of Hawkins’ IE background: “Tracy’s career, first in the private sector, then in the nonprofit sector, is an excellent example of how versatile and impactful industrial engineers can be. Through social entrepreneurship, she established SWN, offering a local and sustainable solution for clean water to many families in Tanzania, as well as creating job opportunities for the people and improving their livelihood.”

The time and attention Hawkins and Kim have devoted to SWN and SWCEA paid off at the 2015 Energy Globe Awards, given out for the best sustainability projects, when SWCEA won first place in the Water category. Kim and his wife attended the awards ceremony, held in Tehran, Iran.

When asked if she has an anecdote that exemplifies for her SWN/SWCEA’s work, Hawkins said she has two.

The first concerns her partner Kim, who comes from an educated family that knew to boil their water. However, Kim said that until he was able to drink filtered water, he always had a stomachache. Now he never has a stomachache, and he never has to go to the doctor.

The second example is a mother who received a filter but told SWN/SWCEA that she used to filter her water through her dirty clothes to get rid of any sand or dirt in the water. Now she doesn’t have to. “So this is what we’re dealing with here,” Hawkins said. “She has a real solution for treating her family’s water.”

When we think of success, we often don’t know how to define it, and when we do, that definition tends to never work in our favor. Rather than becoming a constructive benchmark or approach, success becomes an amorphous concept that always eludes us.

Why is this so? It’s because our society has convinced us that success is equivalent to fame, friends, and fortune, which makes it easier to constantly feel inadequate — like everyone else is doing life better than you can.

We need to redefine what it means to succeed. The traditional measures of success — promotions, high pay, high grades — are not enough. Our lives are made up of so much more than what we tend to measure and account for in a typical cost-benefit analysis. Success in our life must be holistic. After all, our lives have multiple aspects.

I see holistic success as an attitude, one that can help us develop as a complete individual: academically, professionally, spiritually, socially, and all other parts of our life. It’s a mindset that helps us to see our lives not as an endless competition that we’re doomed to lose — where everyone is constantly smarter, more popular, and better than us — but rather as an opportunity to learn, make mistakes, and ultimately, grow.

Part of this holistic view of success as an avenue for personal growth has been understanding the importance of being a global citizen. Through the opportunities that Georgia Tech has provided me, I feel like I have truly been able to push my boundaries, go outside my comfort zone, and grow.

Tech has allowed me to change the world while in college and not have to wait until after I graduate. My extracurricular activities, for example, provide me with ways to take these diverse and interdisciplinary perspectives and apply them toward causes that can better the world.

With the Grand Challenges Living-Learning Community, my team, the Food Fighters, has been working since our freshman year to empower college students who are at risk of food insecurity to take action regarding their food situation. We’ve recently conducted an official study to better understand what food insecurity looks like on Tech’s campus, using our ISyE skills to help us analyze our data.

With One Voice Atlanta, a student organization on campus that works to raise awareness about human trafficking,  assist victims, and prevent such crimes from occurring in the future, I have had amazing opportunities to connect with other community members, like the International Human Trafficking Institute and SKAL International Atlanta, being given the chance to speak and participate at film screenings, social justice nights, and symposiums.

Ultimately, what drives me is inner growth and a need to bring love to people. Even though I struggle with having that growth-oriented mindset and attitude of holistic success all the time, what has truly helped me develop clarity and purpose in times of chaos has been the practice of heartfulness meditation. I started this meditation practice when I was 17 years old, however, I began to meditate much more regularly after I started college. For me, especially at a high-paced environment like Tech, meditation is a way of stepping back, reminding myself that I am alive, and taking  a moment to invest in myself, by doing something that many students seem to have forgotten — to just be.

Heartfulness meditation is about bringing your attention to the heart, helping people connect with the very organ that literally keeps us alive and metaphorically brings us all together. By taking just a moment to bring myself within, I am often reminded of the importance of love and being connected with yourself. And what I’ve learned in the process is that when I choose to work on myself and try to grow as an individual, it creates a ripple that affects my environment and all those around me. As a result, I can begin to change the world — simply by changing myself.

According to UNOS, the United Network for Organ Sharing, currently more than 121,480 people across the United States are waiting for an organ, while 30,970 people received transplants in 2015. In the same year, 6,648 people died on the transplant waitlist, while 6,702 were removed from the list after waiting so long that they became too sick to undergo transplant surgery.

A possible resolution to this problem is to increase the availability of organs. In the past, organs with a small risk of infection were often not chosen for transplant. After several transmissions of infectious diseases that occurred through transplants where these infections (or the risk) were not detected ahead of time, use of many more organs were discouraged because of problems with understanding the risk.

A collaborative project between ISyE and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) addresses this issue of risk estimation and perception, with the goal of assessing the risk of infection in an organ donor, and evaluating the options of receiving an increased-risk donor (IRD) organ versus staying on the waitlist for a patient. Ultimately, the goals are to reduce deaths due to organ transplants transmitting infections, boost the availability of organs without infection for transplant, and reduce the number of patients who die while on the waiting list.

The collaboration started with a Senior Design project, initially focusing on infectious encephalitis in liver transplants.

Under the guidance of Pinar Keskinocak, ISyE’s William W. George Chair, and CDC subject matter experts (SMEs), the fall 2014 Senior Design team — Nishi Anand, Dylan Buczek, Nicholas Buczek, Timothy Lin, Tanay Rajore, and Muriel Wacker — developed   two prototype tools to help physicians and their patients calculate the risk of infectious encephalitis and evaluate the benefits and risks of accepting IRD livers for transplant.

The collaboration has now grown into a $1,104,000 budgeted research project and includes a three- year, $651,000 grant from the Carlos and Marguerite Mason Trust. Joel Sokol, ISyE Fouts Family Associate Professor and Director of Georgia Tech’s interdisciplinary Master of Science in Analytics degree, is the principal investigator on the grant, along with co-investigators Keskinocak and a team of SMEs from the CDC. The ISyE/CDC team will enlarge the project’s scope to other organs and other infectious diseases such as HIV, Hepatitis B and C, as well as pathogens that cause encephalitis. The ISyE investigators will also study the possibility of increased organ sharing among Georgia facilities, to improve the in-state transplant system.

In the next year or two, statistical analysis of probabilities for transmission of infections compared with survival rates for liver, heart, kidney, and lung transplants will be completed. This will be followed by a pilot study of the currently in- development decision support tools in Georgia transplant centers.

In addition to the grant from the Carlos and Marguerite Mason Trust, Georgia Tech will also provide funds toward the project’s indirect costs, and the CDC has agreed to fund a percentage of in-kind work.

However, the machines do not always produce error-free results. Additionally, the high cost of data acquisition on these machines prohibits enough data collection for analysis of these errors.

Kamran Paynabar, ISyE Assistant Professor, and Chitta Ranjan, an ISyE Ph.D. candidate in statistics, worked with collaborators at Harvard Medical School to determine the measurement error rate for MRI machines and its effects on patient diagnosis.

The team used data from the Alzheimer’s Disease Neuroimaging Initiative database, which included information for 741 patients, most of whom were 70 years or older. This information is concerned with observations of patients’ brains to assess for MCI and early AD over a period of up to four years. They were specifically interested in the decline of the hippocampal volume — a brain structure associated particularly with long-term memory.

Such longitudinal data reveals whether cognitive ability of patients “is getting worse over time or it is stable. There often exist some measurement errors associated with MRI systems, and we show that these errors, if not detected and decoupled, may mask a significant declining trend in the cognitive ability of Alzheimer’s patients,” Paynabar explained.

Paynabar, Ranjan, and their collaborators developed a new method to determine the MRI machine errors through what is called “repeatability analysis”: The measurement for a patient is taken over time, and the collected data is put together. If a patient could undergo an MRI with the process repeated in short intervals (for example, every hour or so), it would be easy to determine the measurement error, because the procedure is repeated.

However, because of cost and patient safety considerations, MRIs are not administered more than once a month.

The challenge for the team was how to determine the measurement errors without repeatability. In response, the team developed a statistical model, specifically a model based on mixed-effect regression integrated with a newly developed EM-variogram technique, to determine the measurement error and decouple it from the overall model error.

The statistical model — which was validated in the experimental testing phase of the study — when applied    to MRI data created increased sensitivity, allowing for earlier diagnosis and treatment of cognitive disease. As per government studies, AD is the fifth major cause of death for senior citizens in the U.S. Early treatment of these patients will lead to longer and healthier lifetimes for thousands of people.

Further, Paynabar said, the statistical model has applications beyond Alzheimer’s disease. It is not limited to MRIs but can be applied to “any longitudinal data studies with unrepeated measures.” It can be used for patients with brain tumors and other types of cancers and can also be used in drug testing, quality inspection, and other health care applications where limited data is available due to various practical constraints.

The first, funded by General Electric (GE), looks at sensor data from gas turbines that power electricity generators. The turbines are large and quite expensive to both manufacture and maintain, so they are equipped with thousands of sensors constantly measuring whether the turbines are functioning within normal operation parameters by monitoring temperatures, pressures, and vibrations from different sections of the turbines in a process known as condition monitoring. Immense amounts of data are sent to Atlanta, Georgia, where GE’s monitoring and diagnostic center is located.

Gebraeel’s research team and collaborators include Shabbir Ahmed, ISyE Dean’s Professor and Stewart Faculty Fellow; Kamran Paynabar, ISyE Assistant Professor; Andy Sun, ISyE Assistant Professor; Edmond Chow, CSE Associate Professor and Director of the Intel Parallel Computing Center in the College of Computing; and Polo Chou, CSE Assistant Professor and Associate Director of the M.S. in Analytics program. In response to the Big Data problem, they are developing a new computational platform to provide detection and predictive analytics for the energy industry. This platform assesses the health and performance of equipment in real-time and monitors trends to determine such things as:

• When to order new spare parts so they don’t linger in inventory, costing money and possibly becoming obsolete.
• Prescribing operational profiles that extend an asset’s life without increasing risk of failure.

By integrating detection, prediction, and optimization capabilities, the new prototype platform could help power companies achieve significant savings. Indeed, a preliminary study shows a 40 to 45 percent reduction in maintenance costs alone.

In contrast to the Big Data problem of gas turbines with thousands of sensors is Gebraeel’s project analyzing Big Data from wind farms. A wind farm may have hundreds of turbines, which in turn are equipped with relatively few sensors. Thus — unlike the gas turbines — if one or even several wind turbines stop working, it has relatively little impact on the wind farm’s power production. Furthermore, maintaining wind turbines often requires sending out cranes, or ships in the case of off-shore wind farms, which can be very expensive. So, in contrast to the gas or steam turbines which need to be repaired as soon as one goes down, it’s more cost-efficient to repair several wind turbines at one time. Thus, the optimization model for wind farm maintenance focuses more on opportunistic maintenance.

“They are similar in that the objective is the same, and the constraints are the same, but the dynamics of solving and optimizing them are distinctly different. The perspective on the tradeoffs between the cost of maintenance and operation are almost the reverse,” said Gebraeel. “These two settings represent the wide spectrum of configurations within the energy network.”

Although the gas turbines present a setting with a high number of sensors on a smaller number of units, while the wind turbines represent a large number of units with relatively few sensors, either way, you end up with a Big Data problem.

“ISyE is one of the few engineering disciplines at the intersection of engineering, statistical sciences, and operations research. For example, the analytic algorithms that we develop are all based on statistical methodologies; the optimization models are all based on operations research,” explained Gebraeel. “We are lucky to have some of the best statistics and operations research faculty here in ISyE.”

An important aspect of algorithms designed to deal with Big Data in the energy sector is making sure that they are scalable.

Having a scalable computing architecture means the algorithms can be scaled as well. “Sometimes we test the limits of the algorithms in the research that we do,” said Gebraeel. His research team uses both actual data from GE as well as simulated data. “Then we go to the hypothetical cases: Let’s blow the number of units and the number of sensors beyond what’s available in today’s industry to study the limits of the algorithms we have re-engineered. It helps us understand the scope of their application.”

In order to develop a model for such an infrastructure — one that brings electricity more equitably to rural parts of African countries — researchers from both ISyE and ExxonMobil are working together to create a 30-year model for potential electricity generation. They are focusing particularly onthe east African countries of Rwanda, Burundi, Uganda, Tanzania, and the central African country the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Such a problem is compounded, said Valerie Thomas, ISyE’s Anderson Interface Professor of Natural Systems, because “on the one hand, there are many people without access to electricity and on the other hand, you have the governments and agencies and companies that would build this capacity but also are poor. It’s not that there’s no grid, but there’s not much of one.”

Thomas and ISyE research partner Dima Nazzal, Executive Director of Academic Administration and Student Experience, are confident this problem can be solved, however. “It’s a very difficult problem,” said Nazzal. “We are attempting to design a large-scale complex system that has conflicting performance objectives and significant levels of uncertainty when it comes to electricity generation and storage capacities, electricity demand data, and stakeholders utility, to name a few. But this type of project is perfectly aligned for industrial and systems engineering research. We model these types of systems and try to create robust cost-effective designs – deciding where to locate power plants, where to build the grid network, and how much demand to satisfy, while balancing limited financial and natural resources.”

One possible solution is the hydroelectric resources available in east Africa and other parts of the continent. “There is the potential to build large dams,” explained Thomas, “that could provide electricity reliably in high quantities at low cost, if the generation and transmission system could be built, and if the environmental and social impacts could be addressed. Or, smaller lower-impact hydro power could provide more local solutions.”

Thomas and Nazzal are also considering the balance between fossil fuels such as natural gas or petroleum and more climate-friendly resources such as solar or hydro. ISyE Ph.D. student Amelia Musselman is working with Thomas and Nazzal to develop an optimization model on how to supply electricity to the greatest number of people. She said that right now, she has “the model formulation ready — or at least the first version — and I’m working on programming it and getting the data to solve it.”

ExxonMobil is working in conjunction with the ISyE team to construct models that can evaluate many trade-offs in a systematic manner, by selecting appropriate optimization tools.

According to Thomas, the next step is testing and validating the model to verify that it works: “Then we will do some experiments to answer the big questions about tradeoffs between environmental impact and costs.”

In the Yellowstone project, microphone sensors that look, according to Xie, like a big nail, are placed in the ground. The head of the “nail” — or the microphone — contains the sensor and the data storage card. The “tail” of the sensor contains the receiver, which records the sound waves coming out of the earth, to a depth of the top few kilometers.

On this four-year-long project, Xie is working with a geophysicist from the University of Utah and a professor from the University of Georgia who specializes in developing sensor networks for geophysical structures such as volcanoes. Xie’s role is to “develop new efficient methods to process and analyze the collected large amount of data.”

“I will take the data collected by the sensor network developed by my colleagues and analyze this data for the image [of the earth],” said Xie. “That way we can see how these underlying geophysical structures are evolving over time, and detect any interesting features.”

Because the sensors obviously cannot see through the ground itself, what they record is called ambient noise. According to Xie, ambient noises are the noises or hum made by the earth. Essentially, the sensors listen to the ground and record the hums they hear.

“We will have hundreds and even thousands of sensors placed in the earth to listen at the same time,” she said.

The Yellowstone sensor network has not yet been placed, as the team is still in the process of securing permission for the project from the National Park Service.

Xie is also developing the model for processing all the data. The data she is using comes from an oil company in Texas that has placed a sensor field for purposes of oil exploration. This sensor network is very similar to the one that will be used in Yellowstone.

Xie said that the oil company listens to the earth for about a month, and this generates five terabytes of data. In order to develop and improve the model for processing the data — her task for the first three years of the project — Xie said that she needs to “improve the algorithm and cross-  validate results with my geophysicist colleague to develop efficient algorithms for a distributed sensor system, and produce high-fidelity images in-situ.” In the final year of the project, the team will apply for a permit to place sensors in Yellowstone, deploy the system, and process data from the national park.

“This project has both a scientific flavor as well as algorithmic and theoretical challenges, because it involves Big Data — very high-dimensional data that is continuous over time — and we would like to work online in real-time fashion,” said Xie. “So that fits with my research interests very well.

“At the same time, it will have a real impact on the scientific world. They do need this data analysis technique to analyze this large amount of data, to be able to detect changes in real time, with the need for an algorithm for processing the data.”

This is exactly the challenge that was being faced by the staff of Georgia Tech’s library in the spring of 2016. Tech’s Crosland Tower and Price Gilbert libraries were scheduled to be closed in December 2015 for renovation to make the libraries’ physical space more user-friendly, rather than centered around housing the library’s material collection. In the last 10 years, visits to the libraries have increased by 50 percent, while check-out of print materials has dropped 75 percent in the same time period. Ninety-five percent of the library’s holdings were moved to the new EmTech Library Service Center (LSC).

The LSC is a high-density storage facility – there are about 40-50 similar high-density library storage facilities around the country – designed to permanently house Tech’s library materials, along with most of Emory University’s. The LSC is located on Emory’s Briarcliff campus, where materials are stored on 32-foot-high shelves at a temperature of 55 degrees with 30 percent humidity to preserve the life of the collected materials for up to 250 years.

Because of scheduling issues, Tech needed to get its materials into the LSC in the span of a few months. This was the   ingest process, part of which included what Kimberly Mull, Director of Security, Facilities, and Logistics for the Tech libraries, called “deduping” — removing duplicated book titles, journal runs, and other materials that Tech shared with Emory’s library.

Ingestion also involved processing each individual piece   of material, vacuuming it prior to storage, and giving everything a barcode so books and materials can be located by order pickers within the LSC.

Because the ingestion and set-up process of the LSC was essentially a warehousing project, Catherine Murray-Rust, Dean of Libraries & Vice Provost for Academic Effectiveness at Georgia Tech, knew that this was an area where industrial engineers could play a role. She thought the LSC ingestion process would make a good ISyE Senior Design project.

“If we had some IEs look at the process, then they could bring some warehousing strategies that the library community doesn’t really understand very well and apply them,” said Murray-Rust. “It seemed a really wonderful opportunity to give back to [the library community] from something on the other side of our lives, which is the engineering perspective.”

So that’s where the Senior Design team — Taylor Cormier, Sagar Govil, Ansley Hobbs, Jung Ha Lee, Trisha Long, Sinan Najm, and Andrea Norris (advised by Andrea Laliberte, Edenfield Executive in Residence and Professor of the Practice) — from ISyE stepped in.

“We were looking for a project we were excited about, and [we liked] the idea of having this project so close to campus and involved with Georgia Tech,” said team member Trisha Long. “It’s a really unique project, and we couldn’t have picked a better one.”

The team worked closely with Mull and Jay Forrest, a reference and subject librarian from Tech who was heavily involved with the ingestion process, on developing a plan to make the move from Tech go as smoothly as possible.

Initially, the team visited several other high-density storage sites, including at the University of Georgia and the research facility shared by Duke University, North Carolina State University, and the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. Then the team came back and looked at EmTech’s LSC. These visits gave the Senior Design team information about the kinds of questions they needed to ask about EmTech’s ingestion process, while considering such constraints such as budget, safety concerns, and how much equipment needed to be purchased for the move.

“Our main constraint was trying to reduce the budget as much as possible within the safety constraints, and [visits  to the other high-density facilities] helped us picture how much equipment the library would want to keep [after the move],” explained Long. “We wouldn’t want to buy lots of equipment and have it not be useful, so we tried to take into consideration what they would use – such as how many carts and how many vacuums would keep the collection alive for the next few years.

“After those trips, we were totally inspired. We were able to create a flow-process model that gave us two different ways to make decisions: Is it the fastest way and is it the cheapest way and go back and forth between the two models, and narrow down what our final recommendations were.”

The team came up with several suggestions that positively impacted the ingestion process. One, said Forrest, involved the use of gravity conveyor belt rollers in the processing   line: “Prior to using gravity rollers, we were probably processing 12,000 books per day per average for about a month. We identified a source for gravity rollers, brought them in, and implemented them. That helped us get to 15,500 books per day on average. So that one change improved our throughput quite a bit.”

Perhaps most importantly, the team’s flow-process model and long-term projections confirmed that the library could hire a moving company at several hundred thousand dollars below the projected budget. “We went from one vendor that was over our initial budget to one vendor that was quite a bit under our initial budget,” explained Forrest. “This resulted in cost-savings to both Emory and Tech.”

Now that Georgia Tech’s library collection is safely moved and stored at the LSC, Mull praised the Senior Design team’s role in the success of the move: “I think it was a good collaboration. We see students all the time in the library, but to actually work with them had a good result. We incorporated around 90 percent of the team’s suggestions, and I would love to do another project with another Senior Design team. It left a really good imprint on the library.”

When asked how it made her feel to hear about the positive results of her team’s hard work, Long said, “From the beginning my team was excited to work with the school. The project let us learn so much about our library, and we walked away feeling even more connected to Tech."

A child born today will probably ride to middle school in a driverless car or bus, guided safely along its route by machine-learning algorithms.

Machine learning is a branch of artificial intelligence in which computers are trained to learn from data so as to perform tasks on their own, whether detecting anomalies in a secure computer network, accurately predicting customer demand, or navigating an autonomous vehicle through traffic.

For Georgia Tech engineers, machine learning presents both opportunities and challenges — and the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial & Systems Engineering (ISyE) is well positioned to take a leading role.

“The ISyE School at Georgia Tech has worked very hard over many years to establish an outstanding reputation for combining innovation with applications in engineering,” said Sebastian Pokutta, David M. McKenney Family Associate Professor and Associate Director of Research for the Center for Machine Learning @ Georgia Tech (ML@GT). “This makes us a logical place for the development and deployment of machine learning — perhaps the hottest area of engineering today. We have the benefits of an established research infrastructure with a tradition of close collaboration among all Tech colleges and schools. This tradition extends to our numerous industry partnerships as well. Also, we have terrific, capable people. Our faculty, students, and staff enjoy solving complicated problems — and they’re very good at it.”

All analytical tools share a common purpose in that they extract meaningful information from large sets of data to inform decision making. What sets machine learning apart is its predictive accuracy. Unlike standard computation, where a computer follows explicit instructions from a human programmer to perform a defined task, machine-learning algorithms are trained to look for and remember certain patterns in data that are relevant to the performance of a specified task, which is expressed as a mathematical model. When provided new data — algorithms provide insights, outcomes, and “what-if” scenarios but they cannot create new data — the algorithms then act on their previously gained knowledge, their experience, to solve other   problems or perform tasks by adjusting the model outcomes accordingly. For example: Show a thousand pictures of a dog to a machine-learning algorithm, and it will learn the characteristics of dogs and then be able to pick them out from a gallery of animal photos.

Machine learning is not new. It’s the technology that powers search engines as well as recommendation systems used by Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, eHarmony, and thousands of other sites.

What’s new is the rapidly increasing number and scope of applications for machine learning, boosted by the availability of tremendous amounts of data, cheap data storage, advances in high-performance computing, and the development of increasingly sophisticated machine-learning algorithms.

Applications run a diverse gamut from supply chains and logistics to computer vision and object recognition; from autonomous vehicles and natural language processing to health data analysis and manufacturing.

From an industrial engineer’s perspective, machine learning is a powerful way to automate the optimization process in large, complex systems involving petabytes of data — a scale too large to be handled by traditional computation.

At ISyE, machine-learning techniques go hand-in-hand with the school’s traditional research and education mission that emphasizes the development of methodologies to solve real- world problems.

“We’re interested in developing and devising machine- learning and optimization methodologies to see how they interact with each other and whether they can be made to interact in a very integrated way,” said Pokutta. “Then deploy these technologies or methods in real-world applications in a variety of different domains.”

While machine learning is concerned with studying data to obtain new insights, “you still have to do something with those insights,” he continued, “and that’s where the optimization part comes into play because you have to make those insights actionable by turning them into decisions — that’s whenthe connection between machine learning and optimization becomes apparent.”

ISyE faculty are involved with machine learning in a number of key areas including:

Supply Chains and Logistics

When it comes to optimizing supply chains regarding production, supply, product deployment, distribution, and delivery, machine-learning research and development at ISyE are having a profound impact in two ways. One, they automate routine supply chain decisions, enhancing speed and efficiency. And two, machine-learning algorithms provide human decision makers with predictive analysis and guidance for the choices they make in response to changing circumstances. In effect, machine learning is making supply chains smarter, which dovetails with the emerging concept of the physical internet.

The physical internet takes some of the basic characteristics of the information internet — open access, standardization, interconnectedness, digitization, speed — and applies them to the operation of supply chains and logistics, said Benoit Montreuil, Coca-Cola Material Handling and Distribution Chair, Professor, and Director and founder of the Physical Internet Center.

 “In this context,” he continued, “we’re taking advantage of the physical internet’s digital aspect to hyperconnect all facets of a given business, and then using machine learning to understand the business more deeply. We have a project right now with an industry partner where we’re using machine- learning techniques to model product availability through their autonomous dealer networks, their factory, and warehouses in order to help them make better decisions.”

Montreuil anticipates that machine-learning algorithms will eventually automate a significant portion of product movement through the adoption of smart, standardized modular cargo containers — a key component of the physical internet. Fitted with sensors and two-way communication with the shipper through a wireless computer network, containers will learn how to operate in a dynamic environment and be largely self-directing, he said.

“You will communicate to the container that it has to be in Chicago in 18 hours, let’s say, and it will work as autonomously as possible to get there, interacting with humans or more sophisticated logistics agents only as necessary, using machine learning as one of the reasoning mechanisms to make sure the modular container goes where it is supposed to go.”

Machine-learning algorithms and techniques being developed by ISyE researchers Schneider National Chair in Transportation and Logistics Chelsea White, Coca-Cola Professor Alan Erera, H. Milton Stewart Associate Professor Mohit Singh, and Assistant Professor He Wang, also support supply chain forecasting models that more accurately predict the impact of demand variables, and thereby help decision makers optimize their supply chain operations. Common influences on demand include new product introductions, seasons and holidays, consumer preferences and trends, product promotions, weather, and material shortages.

The work will enable companies to better manage inventory levels, improve delivery times, enhance customer satisfaction, and ultimately save money. Machine-learning analysis also provides management with a dynamic view and a high level of visibility of the core processes and elements of their supply chain.

Algorithms work with historical data as well as data drawn from contemporary sources such as social media, where the first inkling of important consumer trends often appear. In a method called online learning, data becomes available in a sequential order, and decisions are made in real time. For example, when a company launches a new product, it can use online learning to track the sales data and adjust its pricing and inventory strategies for this product.

Machine learning also facilitates a rapid response   to unexpected disruptions to the supply chain, such as a natural disaster in an area that’s the source of a particular raw material, thereby enabling companies to seek alternatives.

“There’s a lot of ground work still to be done in machine learning as it relates to supply chains and logistics,” said Montreuil. “It’s a very pioneering domain and a fantastic time for researchers.”

Health Care

The U.S. health care system is awash in data: electronic health records; claims data; medical procedure results such as EKG readings, lab test findings, and genetic analysis; and health- monitoring information from wearable devices.

This wealth of data is fueling innovative analytics- based research for improving health care in three main areas: efficiency (cost), effectiveness (outcomes), and public health, particularly in terms of equity in the system and ensuring that the needs of vulnerable populations are addressed. In addition, data analytics can make it possible to tailor medical treatment to the needs and characteristics of individual patients, said Julie Swann, Harold R. and Mary Anne Nash Professor and Co-director of the Interdisciplinary Research Center for Health & Humanitarian Systems, adding that “we’re still in the early stages of what is being called individualist or precision medicine.

“You have to have a large enough set of data so that you can start to draw conclusions from it,” she continued. “These datasets may be deep, very detailed, and could also be wide in the sense that you’re bringing together heterogeneous data types.”

While data is becoming increasingly available, it takes a lot of resources and advanced methodologies to fully harness its power, according to Swann.

Machine learning is one set of analytic techniques that’s being used to turn data into information and knowledge for application at either the policy level or patient population level.

Algorithms create a mathematical model specific to a particular area of inquiry, such as patient care at a particular hospital, that imparts a big picture understanding of the system and how certain decisions or actions affect the system as a whole. More important, the algorithms can predict the consequences of one decision versus another regarding whatever metric is being studied.

“Data can drive decision making,” she said. “For example, you can use data to inform what kinds of things insurance should be required to pay for or what interventions associated with a specific disease or illness are most effective at reducing the burden on the entire system.”

Machine learning and analytics can reach down to the clinician level in exceptional detail to look at, say, continuous patient monitoring in an intensive care unit. Researchers can learn what kinds of medical situations qualify for monitoring and for how long, what medical actions were taken related to the monitoring, and if a personalized treatment approach would be possible, based on certain patient characteristics.

“The modeling of systems that have tens of thousands of constraints or variables can be used to evaluate access to health care too,” said Nicoleta Serban, Coca-Cola Associate Professor with the ISyE Health Analytics research group. “For example, collecting health care utilization data involving millions of individuals for events such as hospitalizations can be used in estimating the cost savings of preventive care. Modeling to assess for the occurrence of severe health outcomes, applied to data for millions of individuals, can be used to characterize what impacts health care utilization behaviors. Distributed computing is used to improve the computational effort of such methods.”

In one problem solving application of machine learning to health care, ISyE faculty are analyzing data from Geisinger, a hospital network in Pennsylvania, to help predict the risk for sepsis and septic shock in patients before they are admitted   to the hospital. Sepsis and septic shock are the dominant causes of death in intensive care units in the U.S., accounting for up to three million cases yearly. The next step is to facilitate prevention measures by applying the analytical techniques developed by ISyE to real-time patient data at each of Geisinger’s various locations.

A machine-learning framework called DAMIP discovers gene signatures that can predict vaccine immunity and efficacy on an individual basis.

Developed by Professor Eva Lee and her colleagues from Emory and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the work marks an important advance in both developing new vaccines and better vaccines to fight emerging infections and improve monitoring for poor responses in people with weak immune systems.

DAMIP-implemented results for yellow fever demonstrated that a vaccine’s ability to immunize a patient could be successfully predicted with   greater than 90 percent accuracy within a week after vaccination. Results for flu vaccine demonstrated DAMIP’s applicability to both live-attenuated and inactivated vaccines. Similar results in a malaria study enabled targeted delivery to individual patients.

Additional health care applications of machine learning by ISyE faculty include quantifying disparities in access to pediatric primary care, evaluating the impact of access to pediatric asthma care on severe health outcomes, projecting the impact of Medicaid expansion in Georgia on access to adult primary care, and estimating the cost savings on preventive dental care for young children.

Swann emphasized that health care research at ISyE is collaborative. “Many of us are affiliated with other entities on campus such as the Center for Health & Humanitarian Systems and the Health Analytics group. We also draw upon the expertise of statisticians, computer scientists, optimization experts, systems engineering experts, and others in the area of advanced analytics, and machine learning is one part of that work toward improved health care decision making.”

Energy

ISyE researchers at the Strategic Energy Institute (SEI) are helping the companies that produce and distribute electricity maintain their capital assets and provide uninterrupted service to their customers. These assets — transformers, turbines, generators — have been fitted with thousands of sensors that continuously stream performance data in real time to central monitoring centers scattered around the country. At the centers, data is analyzed for anomalies or abnormal behavior, which would trigger repair or maintenance actions to avoid a catastrophic system failure.

“You need really efficient analytical tools to analyze this data,” said Nagi Gebraeel, Georgia Power Associate Professor and Associate Director of SEI, “and the underlying basis of these tools is machine learning.”

Going a step further, machine-learning algorithms can predict the risk of asset failure over time. This knowledge allows utilities to optimize operations in terms of pricing, customer demand, and energy production, while maximizing their investment in multi-million-dollar assets, many of which are operating well beyond their design lifetime. For instance, data may show that derating the load on a particular generator by a specific amount would extend its life by a certain percentage.

The machine-learning algorithms developed for optimizing the power grid are applicable to  any situation where abundant sensor data could accommodate trend analysis, such as for monitoring the performance of jet engines, locomotives, diesel generators on ships, or the engines of a truck fleet.

Interactive Optimization and Learning

At ISyE’s Laboratory for Interactive Optimization and Learning (IOL), research takes place at the “intersection of optimization and machine learning,” according to Pokutta.

Working across academic boundaries, IOL researchers have completed more than 20 projects so far in areas including logistics and supply chain management, manufacturing, predictive analytics, big data, digital services, energy, transportation, and medical and health care systems.

In addition, IOL is involved in a number of significant activities designed to advance basic science and drive innovation.

One project on the medical diagnosis side involves digital scanning technology that uses 3-D cameras and Kinect sensors to produce 3-D models of individuals for medical diagnoses. Machine-learning and optimization techniques look for certain anomalies in the model scan data, and a report is generated.

At present, the technology could serve two potential applications. One is to screen pregnant women for cephalopelvic disproportion (CPD), a condition where the baby’s head or body is too large to pass through the mother’s pelvis. It is a preventable contributor to infant and maternal mortality in developing countries where neither ultrasound testing nor Cesarean delivery are available in rural areas. Women who are determined to be at high risk for CPD could then be referred to urban clinics for medically supervised labor or a Cesarean procedure.

Another potential diagnostic application of the ISyE invention is for the early detection of lymphedema, a severe, permanent swelling of an arm or leg that often follows surgery, chemotherapy, or radiation for breast cancer. Lymphedema is caused by a fluid buildup in lymph nodes damaged by the cancer treatment and afflicts an estimated four million people in the U.S.

The scanning technology could support a low-cost diagnostic device at home to detect the first signs of lymphedema by tracking patients’ limb-fluid volumes over time. This early warning would give patients enough time to begin taking preventive measures that could thwart the onset of disease.

Manufacturing/Engineering Statistics

ISyE’s System Informatics and Control (SIAC) group contributes to machine-learning capabilities by providing a new scientific base for the design, analysis, and control of complex manufacturing and service systems, anchored to the effective and seamless integration of physical and analytical models with empirical data-driven methodologies, according to Jianjun Shi, Carolyn J. Stewart Chair and Professor.

In practical terms, SIAC faculty develops quantitative models unified with data extraction and engineering knowledge integration capabilities, and then deploys these models in the analysis and control of complex manufacturing and service systems.

SIAC’s research involves faculty with complementary backgrounds in manufacturing and service systems, quality and reliability engineering, diagnostics and prognostics, industrial statistics and data mining, and automation and control.

Shi’s research centers on monitoring, diagnosis, and control of manufacturing systems. “I am working on multiple data fusion for abnormality detection in the semiconductor manufacturing process,” said Shi, who studies the massive amounts of data continuously streamed from hundreds of sensors embedded into the manufacturing equipment. “The challenges are how to extract useful information from the data, learn the system’s behavior, and improve its performance.”

The analytical issues are complicated by sensing data’s high dimensionality, variety, and velocity; and intricate spatial and temporal structures.

ISyE faculty solve these challenges by developing scaleable and agile machine-learning techniques that provide effective modeling and analysis of multi-sensor data streams, allowing researchers  to extract essential information for manufacturing improvement.

In addition to real-time monitoring and fault diagnosis and control, machine learning facilitates online product inspection and can predict potential failures in the manufacturing process, thereby allowing time for planning corrective and preventive actions.

In related research, Assistant Professor Yao Xie focuses on detecting changes in massive data streams, which usually signal anomaly and novelty, as quickly as possible, and then analyzes them in real time.

She develops real-time change-point detection algorithms based on statistical and optimization theory for high-dimensional streaming data, which are usually dynamic in nature, corrupted, and carry incomplete data.

Xie has solved problems including seismic network data processing, social network event detection, environmental monitoring, and power network monitoring. She is currently working on accelerating the processing of the massive amount of sequential data generated from material science for the Materials Genome Initiative.

Professor Xiaoming Huo is developing fast algorithms to build predictive models from distributed inference, meaning the information is scattered among various locations and cannot be transported to a centralized database. The algorithms must be communication efficient, requiring only a minimal amount of communication between data locations.

A practical example is a company such as Walmart, which houses transactional data at its thousands of stores. Huo’s algorithms would allow the retailer to utilize this distributed data to create predictive models for logistics purposes.

Another approach to utilizing distributed data may be termed “physics based and data-driven analytics,” said Jeff Wu, Coca-Cola Chair in Engineering Statistics and Professor, and is a useful computational technique for some engineering and sciences applications. Here, data is derived from physics and then subjected to statistical data analysis.

Wu cited the example of designing the next generation of rockets for the U.S. Air Force. The physics, typically described or modeled by partial differential equations, must be understood first before a physical model can be built. The model is then refined by using a statistical analytic approach on large or small data.

Theory of Machine Learning and Optimization

Over the past decade or so, machine learning has become perhaps the most “intelligent customer” of convex optimization, and the major outer driving force influencing the development of convex optimization, according to Arkadi Nemirovski, John Hunter Chair and Professor.

Numerous mathematical models arising in machine learning are of an optimization nature, which is why optimization algorithms form a significant part of the machine-learning toolbox, he pointed out. Typically, optimization problems of machine- learning origin are extremely large-scale. Their numerical processing requires the most advanced optimization techniques and is possible primarily when the problems are convex and well-structured.

Convexity as it pertains to mathematical optimization is a term denoting problems in which local information can be used to determine key global characteristics of a problem. This “local implying global” feature is also true of linear programming, the older, traditional programming technique that allows the computation of optimal decisions efficiently, assuming that the world is linear. Linear problems are also convex problems, with applications that include how to allocate time on a communications satellite among competing users, or for studying the relationship between traffic delay times and the number of cars on the road.

But not every problem is linear. Supply chain efficiency, for instance, is not a linear function of resources available. Convex optimization models provide a way of more accurately representing problems that account for real-world uncertainty.

Associate Professor Santanu Dey offered an example of the use of convex optimization in design of electrical power systems dispatch algorithms, a joint project with faculty colleague Assistant Professor Andy Sun and graduate student Burak Kocuk.

“Among other things, our results indicate that older generation algorithms that use a linear approximation of physical laws such as Ohm’s law and Kirchhoff’s current law produce inferior performance in comparison to our new methods using the more powerful general convex optimization methods.”

Convex problems form a “solvable case” in optimization, Nemirovski continued. “These are the problems for which high-accuracy approximations to optimal solutions can be found in an efficient fashion.”

The close connection between optimization and machine learning goes beyond the fact that optimization forms the computational building blocks for the majority of machine-learning methods. Results from the optimization field have also been used to analyze data efficiency in machine learning. As an example, Assistant Professor Huan Xu works in the intersection between robust optimization (an optimization paradigm to address uncertainty) and machine learning. He has shown that some popular machine-learning algorithms are implicitly solving robust optimization formulations, and this robustness provides a unified tool that establishes favorable statistical properties of these algorithms. In effect, learning happens because uncertainty is carefully addressed.

Nemirovski, along with Professor Alexander Shapiro, Associate Professor George Lan, and Professor Anatoli Juditsky from Université Joseph Fourier, play a leading role in the design of efficient stochastic optimization methods, which are at the core of modern machine-learning approaches.

These methods can make progress by only using limited information. In fact, they can often find solutions of acceptable quality without the need to observe the entire dataset. Consequently, they are the focus of much interest and research in computer science, industrial engineering, and other research communities interested in big data.

Many distributed, large-scale optimization problems involve translating large data sets into effective actions, which is a research interest of George Nemhauser, A. Russell Chandler III Chair and Institute Professor, and Shabbir Ahmed, Dean’s Professor and Stewart Faculty Fellow. Ahmed illustrated with the example of coordinating the movement of autonomous vehicles in a network. The vehicles could be school buses or a fleet of delivery trucks that deliver loads from many sources to several destinations.

If each vehicle makes an independent decision as to which route it follows moving from A to B, some links within the network may become overly congested. Thus for smooth operation, the vehicles need to collect and learn from the traffic information in the network and adapt accordingly.

The information includes historical traffic data and real-time data from auxiliary sources such as road sensors and other autonomous vehicles on the road. This collective learning enables each vehicle to access a more accurate representation of the surrounding world.

“This logistics problem can be set up as a decentralized stochastic routing problem for which some of the approaches that ISyE faculty are working on can be adapted,” Ahmed noted.

Another example where machine learning would make decisions in an uncertain environment may be found in health care. Consider a cancer patient who receives a certain cancer-fighting drug every day. The problem is that doctors cannot know in advance the impact of any given drug on any given patient. If one is applying drug A, and the tumor is not growing but not shrinking either, should one switch to a different drug, with the hope that it might shrink the tumor? What is the optimal way to administer different drugs over time?

This particular optimization problem is known as the “multi-armed bandit” problem, referring to the choices facing someone playing several slot machines but who does not know the payoff of each arm in advance, and thus must decide which arms to play and when.

Similar trade-offs arise in many industries ranging from online advertising to logistics, in which one must decide how to allocate resources over time between different alternatives whose benefits and costs are uncertain.

“Fundamental to such problems is the question of how to combine ideas from probability — due to the inherent uncertainty in the problem — with ideas from optimization since one wants to select between alternatives as intelligently as possible,” said David Goldberg, A. Russell Chandler III Assistant Professor, whose study of probability and optimization are core to his expertise as well as to the entire field of operations research.

“One particular question I am studying is how to use ideas from probability theory to understand what an ‘optimal’ machine-learning algorithm will do when presented with trade-offs, how simpler heuristics compare to this optimal algorithm, and how to use these insights to design new algorithms and insights for machine learning.”

Analytics

As the extraction of useful, actionable information from data, analytics undergirds everything at the ISyE school, which specializes in the development and application of cutting-edge analytics tools based on statistics, operations research, and optimization.

“We have a long history of being a world leader, way before ‘analytics’ became a buzzword,” said Joel Sokol, Associate Professor and Director of the Master of Science in Analytics degree. “Machine learning is currently one of the hottest analytics tools being applied to analyze large and complex data sets, and ISyE has several specialists in both machine-learning theory and its application in a variety of industries.”

One of Sokol’s research interests is sports analytics, which uses machine learning and other computational techniques for predictive and optimization tasks.

While sports teams — particularly baseball — have long sought guidance from statistics, the availability of massive datasets covering virtually every conceivable metric offer a far better basis for optimal decision making.

Analytics techniques may be applied to sports management operations, game strategy, player performance and draft choice evaluation, and can even help a coach determine the optimal lineup for any given opponent.

Sokol devised a mathematical model for predicting the outcome of NCAA Division I basketball tournament games. With data input consisting only of which two teams played, who held home-court advantage, and the margin of victory, the model has consistently outperformed standard ranking systems.

Machine Learning @ Georgia Tech

Underscoring the growing importance of machine- learning research across campus, ML@GT was launched this past summer and named one of Georgia Tech’s Interdisciplinary Research Centers. One of the focus areas of the center is to develop and study machine-learning processes and applications within or with close ties to the engineering disciplines. Pokutta, one of the Associate Directors of the Center, emphasizes that this is what makes the Tech center unique.

“While there are other machine-learning centers in the U.S., they are focused mainly on the interactions between statistics and computing,” he noted. “The distinguishing feature of our Center is its incorporation of the engineering component.”

In fact, the Center is an interdisciplinary effort involving all colleges and schools across campus. It is expected to serve as a nexus for collaborative machine-learning research as well as a one-stop resource for partnerships between Tech and industry.

“Machine learning will significantly impact the way we solve problems by making the process more dynamic and realistic,” Pokutta says. “ISyE definitely has a strong stake in the machine-learning center and also has high interest in interacting with it and making it work.”

Senior Design Team GTAA Gameday Flow was tasked by the Georgia Tech Athletic Association (GTAA) to redesign game day operations to improve the fan experience at Bobby Dodd Stadium. The team created a new staffing plan at all entry gates, which will reduce average fan waiting time by 78 percent. The team delivered a concept design for a new concession stand in the southeast corridor that integrates the Tapingo mobile ordering platform. The new stand will pay for itself while simultaneously reducing the congestion in the lower east corridor by 64 percent. The team developed a business case for using Tapingo at all stadium concession stands. They additionally proposed a police offer placement plan on Northside Drive that can reduce average traffic commute time on this road by 73 percent. The recommendations will save fans 13,000 hours of wait time over a season.

The Senior Design team designed a queuing strategy for the entry gates and concession stands, which involved converting multiple queues to a single queue that distributes to multiple servers. Fundamentally, a single queue (like at amusement parks) is faster than multiple queues (like at a grocery store). The team worked with the GTAA to implement a pilot of these queues during the October 29 Tech-Duke game at Gate 8 and one of the concession stands in the east concourse of the stadium. The team observed that there was a dramatic reduction in wait time in the queues, and so the GTAA plans to continue this queuing strategy and expand it to the rest of the stadium.

“Georgia Tech Athletics is proud to be able to partner with such a great group of ISyE seniors,” said Doug Allvine (BSIE 92, MBA 11), Georgia Tech Assistant Athletic Director. “The Senior Design team’s ability to assess real game day processes and propose improvements and new ideas that could positively impact our football fan/alumni experience is tremendously valuable.”

Team members included Murtaza Ali, Julia Bodea, Justin Hey, Jamie Morsberger, Jamison Porter, Aditya Raghupathy, Jennifer Sanders, and Kristen Shiflett. They were advised by Associate Professor Steven Hackman.

Senior Design Team CDC HIV Network developed a model that estimates HIV spread over time through a community of injection drug users (IDU) during an outbreak and evaluates the effectiveness of three intervention strategies: syringe exchange programs (SEP), pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP), and antiretroviral therapy (ART). The interventions were compared by the number of HIV cases averted as a result of their implementation and by the cost per quality adjusted life year gained. Using data from the outbreak in Scott County, IN, SEP was the dominate strategy for most scenarios, although this depended to some extent on the number of days since the start of the outbreak and the budget. The lifetime treatment cost of each HIV case is $433,000, resulting in significant cost savings for each case averted. A user-friendly interface allows state health departments to understand the impact of these various interventions in order to improve HIV outbreak response in the future.

The team successfully presented their project to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Their work was recommended by team leads and is now being scheduled for discussion at the division-level senior leadership meeting, as well as the Center-level seminar. The CDC is planning to pilot the project pre-outbreak in selected state health departments, such as Kentucky and West Virginia, to advise them on how to prepare for an outbreak.

Team members included Bingyi Bao, Anmol Chhabria, Mathew Martini, Saeed Siddiqi, Katheryn Stephens, David Wang, Yuanheng Wang, and Yuyu Wang. They were advised by Virginia C. and Joseph C. Mello Chair and Professor Paul Griffin.

Senior Design Team Janssen Plan worked with client Janssen Pharmaceutica, a Johnson & Johnson company and global leader in the pharmaceutical industry. With a variety of experience and backgrounds, the team strived to embody their client’s motto: “There is so much work to be done … patients are waiting.” Working with their client, the team used predictive analytics and machine learning in order to identify and understand elements that cause delays within the drug development process. Specifically, they focused their efforts on building a predictive model, evaluating lead indicators of delay, developing a dashboard design, and providing Janssen with data structure recommendations. Their proof of concept is a step in the right direction that enables Janssen to both increase the number of drugs they can develop internally and release drugs to patients sooner.

The project’s result will help Janssen predict drug development delay and expand the company’s R&D portfolio by using statistical analysis and machine learning, accompanied with comprehensive yet user-friendly dashboard visualization, which highlights the insight from the underlying analysis and model. The proof of concept improves Janssen’s ability to accurately anticipate upcoming delay from the R&D pipeline (86 percent accuracy in delay prediction). Janssen can better allocate resources to either minimize the delays or reallocate the resources for unavoidably delayed projects to a new trial or project.

Team members included Siham Adous, Mou Anzhi, Alex Berry, Ai He, Nidhi Koshy, Christina Leamon, Lichen Jason Shen, and Shen Wang. They were advised by James C. Edenfield Chair and Professor Martin Savelsbergh.

Senior Design Team Wrigley's Lifesavers, which took home the Judges’ Choice Award at the Capstone Expo, worked with the Wrigley manufacturing plant in Chattanooga, Tennessee, to develop a solution for reducing unmet demand for Lifesavers mints. In evaluating the current system, a bottleneck was identified in the bagging stage of production. The team worked to create an optimization tool with an AMPL back-end and an Excel/VBA front-end, to minimize low-throughput bag combinations, thus increasing overall production for the entire system.

The solution resulted in an eight percent decrease in suboptimal bag combinations and a one percent increase in overall production of Lifesavers mints worldwide. Wrigley has since fully integrated the tool.

Team members included Coleman Alford, Zachary Cote, Young Jae Han, Dongwoo Kim, Robert Pagan, Abhi Malhotra, and Feifan Zheng. They were advised by Professor Renato Monteiro.

Dr. Martin Savelsbergh and Dr. Benoit Montreuil serve as SCL’s co-directors of research and Savelsbergh will continue to serve as leader of global transportation research and Montreuil will serve as leader of Georgia Tech’s new Physical Internet Center. Tim Brown will continue to serve as SCL’s managing director and lead the direction of educational programming.

SCL will continue to maintain strong ties with the Stewart School of Industrial & Systems Engineering, and continue to grow its offerings in public, custom, and online professional education programming. Additionally, SCL will maintain its relationship with its operations in Panama, Costa Rica, Mexico, Singapore, and Savannah. New industry, university, and scientific advisory boards are being established to provide input to the future of SCL as an IRC.

We are also excited to report that SCL sister organization, the Center for Health and Humanitarian Systems, has also been designated as an IRC!

Soldner is now an advanced analytics manager for UPS, where she works on research and development projects and consults within the company. Her recent TED@UPS talk, “Your Company's Data Could Help End World Hunger,” is featured on the TED website and to date has been seen almost 675,000 times.

In this interview, Soldner discusses her passion for solving humanitarian issues and the idea of data philanthropy, which was the subject of her TED talk. (View Soldner’s TED talk here: http://bit.ly/2gLOQyp.)

Briefly describe how you began focusing on health and humanitarian issues in your graduate work at ISyE.

My research at Georgia Tech focused on how to improve decision-making in health and humanitarian operations. Application areas included optimization of the food aid supply chain, humanitarian staff reassignment, bottleneck management in transportation networks, allocation of limited resources (e.g., blood or vaccines), malaria prevention logistics, and HIV clinic integration. 

One of the best things about ISyE’s CHHS is its collaborations with real-word projects. During my first year at ISyE, I began working at the UN World Food Programme (WFP), where I worked for the next four years developing prototype decision support tools for routing, port bottleneck management, and food basket design/pipeline planning. The work took me from my tiny office at ISyE, to the WFP headquarters office in Rome, Italy, and on the ground in Zambia to witness supply chain movements firsthand. These humanitarian issues interest me because an engineering approach to get the most from every aid dollar translates into lives saved.

You recently gave a TED talk on how private companies could contribute data and decision scientists to aid humanitarian efforts. You called this “data philanthropy.” First of all, define what a decision scientist does, and please explain what data philanthropy is and how – in your words – “this is the future of corporate social responsibility.”

A decision scientist transforms pressing concerns into mathematical models that can help address the question at hand with the data available. Decisions can then be informed by the models or the insights generated by the models, which can lead to better choices.

My TED talk focuses on data philanthropy — companies donating their data, their decision scientists, and their technology to capture new sources of data. Data philanthropy is a modern extension of traditional corporate philanthropic activities.

Over the past decade, there has been a paradigm shift in how companies donate; it is no longer just about writing a check. Instead, there is an increased focus on sharing expertise and partnering. We are just seeing the tip of the iceberg in terms of the impact data can have on the humanitarian sector.

In your TED talk, you described a younger, highly optimistic Mallory who came to the UN World Food Programme in Rome with the intention of solving world hunger. As you say in your talk, your initial efforts were not successful. In spite of what could be considered a failure in this regard, what were your most important takeaways from this experience?

The real world faces many problems that an idealistic student assumes have already been solved. For example, you can have the perfect mathematical model, but if you do not have access to the necessary data that the model assumes, then you have to go back to the drawing board.

This was the case with the first prototype model that I took to Rome, but it wasn’t the end of the story. We continued to get feedback on the initial model and continued to refine the decision-making scope (e.g., changing from daily routing decisions to monthly tactical decisions). We also adapted the model for the available data, which led to a new prototype at the end of my time at WFP. The prototype was eventually implemented and impacts food aid operations touching millions of lives.

The single biggest takeaway from the experience was the importance of long-term partnerships and persistence. When you hit a wall, learn from it, and don’t be afraid to try a different approach.

Why did you move from the nonprofit sector to working for UPS?

Being in the private sector gives me the opportunity to be at the forefront of applying models and data to make better decisions. It’s a fascinating environment for someone like me who enjoys seeing theory being adapted for practical applications. Through the UPS Foundation, I have also been able to stay connected to the humanitarian sector, which makes it the best of both worlds.

What is the most exciting and fulfilling aspect of your current job?

I work with a bright team of other academics turned practitioners on a variety of R&D and internal consulting projects. One aspect of the job that I have really enjoyed is getting to work with many different parts of the business, from marketing to operations to pricing. In addition to interesting logistics and modeling problems, I am exploring avenues for larger data philanthropy projects in the humanitarian sector.

What are some of the biggest problems in the humanitarian sector that IEs will be working on in the next five years?

IEs can have an impact on many different areas in the humanitarian sector.

One trend I see is an increase in beneficiary-level data, whether that is from cellphones, Twitter, or even donated private sector package scanners. This data gives visibility to the final mile and handover point of the humanitarian supply chain and is rich with potential application areas to improve forecasting and streamline operations. 

Another interesting topic where IEs can have an impact is on coordinating the different humanitarian organizations’ responses together to maximize their impact. It is still the early days of making use of data for challenging problems in the sector, which makes it all the more important for engineers to get involved.

What do you see as your career trajectory for the next 5-10 years?

Over the next 5-10 years, I want to keep solving challenging business problems, expanding my analytics toolkit and experiences, and continuing to be an evangelist for data philanthropy. I was really inspired a couple of months ago when I visited Civic Hall in New York City, which is a collaborative workspace dedicated to projects for public good. I would like to explore whether a similar environment could be created in Atlanta if we tapped into and fostered the local Data for Good community.

INFORMS Fellow

Jeff Linderoth, Professor and Department Chair at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and an ISyE Ph.D. alumnus (1998) advised by James C. Edenfield Chair and Professor Martin Savelsbergh, was chosen as an INFORMS Fellow. 

INFORMS Fellows are examples of outstanding lifetime achievement in operations research and the management sciences. They have demonstrated exceptional accomplishments and made significant contributions to the advancement of OR/MS over a period of time.

Chairperson

Assistant Professor Kamran Paynabar has been elected the new chair of the Quality, Statistics, and Reliability section of INFORMS.

Winners

Paul Brooks, a Ph.D. student at Virginia Commonwealth University advised by Professor Eva Lee, and Jose Dula won the SAS Data Mining Best Paper Award for “Robust PCA via L1-Norm Line Fitting.”

Ph.D. student Qiushi Chen; George Family Foundation Assistant Professor Turgay Ayer; and Jagpreet Chhatwal of Harvard Medical School and MGH won first prize in the  INFORMS Decision Analysis Society Student Paper Competition for “Optimal Liver Cancer Surveillance In Hepatitis C Infected Population.” The team developed a novel modeling framework to determine the optimal policy for liver cancer screening, which balances the health and cost outcomes in the most cost-effective way and also has practical structures for policy implementation.

Ph.D. student Xiaolei Fang, co-advised by Assistant Professor Kamran Paynabar and Georgia Power Associate Professor Nagi Gebraeel, received the SAS Data Mining Best Paper Award for “Residual Useful Lifetime Prediction Using a Degradation Image Stream.” This paper proposes a new methodology for residual useful lifetime prediction of a system using a sequence of degradation images.

Virginia C. and Joseph C. Mello Chair and Professor Paul Griffin and former Penn State Ph.D. student Nathaniel Bastian are winners of the Koopman Prize, given to the outstanding publication in military operations research of the previous year, for “The AMEDD Uses Goal Programming to Optimize Workforce Planning Decisions.” The mission of the Army Medical Department (AMEDD) is to provide medical and health care delivery for the U.S. Army. Given the large number of medical specialties in the AMEDD, determining the appropriate number of hires and promotions for each medical specialty is a complex task. Griffin and Bastian developed an objective force model to project the number of hires, promotions, and personnel inventory for each medical specialty across the AMEDD to support a 30-year life cycle.

Ph.D. student Simon Mak and Professor Roshan Vengazhiyil won the Quality, Statistics, and Reliability section’s Best Student Paper Competition for “Support Points.” In this paper, Mak and Vengazhiyil discuss how support points are a new way to compact a probability distribution into optimal sampling points. Being optimal, these points can provide significant improvements to many quality and reliability fields by reducing monetary and computation costs in simulation.

Ph.D. students Chitta Ranjan and Samaneh Ebrahimi, advised by Assistant Professor Kamran Paynabar, received the SAS Data Mining Best Paper Award for the paper “Sequence Graph Transform (SGT): A Feature Extraction Function for Sequence Data Mining.” Ranjan and Ebrahimi developed the SGT method, which captures any amount of short- to long-term pattern (regulated by one parameter) without any increase in computation. It removes the computation shackles and leaves it on us to keep as much long-term patterns as required for the data analysis. SGT is a paradigm shift in sequence mining—flat computation and higher accuracy.

Josh Reed, an alumnus of the ISyE Ph.D. program (2007), was awarded the Erlang Prize of the Applied Probability Society of INFORMS. The prize was awarded for his many outstanding contributions to the analysis of stochastic systems, but most notably for his resolution of a long-standing conjecture regarding the scaling of a fundamental model which arises in the study of queues. In particular, Reed showed that under very general assumptions, the number waiting in queue scales like the square root of the number of servers for a family of stochastic models which arises frequently in the study of service systems such as large-scale call centers. This answered a long-standing conjecture of one of the leaders in the field, Ward Whitt, who (along with Shlomo Halfin) proved in 1981 that this scaling is correct for the special case of exponentially distributed service times.  To prove this result, Reed developed many new tools in the theory of stochastic processes, especially so-called measure valued processes, which are required to deal with the complex mathematics of general service time distributions in many-server systems. He now joins the ranks of many associated with Georgia Tech who have won this prize in the past, including Ton Dieker, Bert Zwart, and Jim Dai.

Tuo Zhao, who will join ISyE as an assistant professor in January 2017, received the SAS Data Mining Best Paper Award for “Calibrated Multivariate Regression with Application to Neural Semantic Basis Discovery.” Zhao’s paper proposes a novel sparse learning method for adaptively estimating high-dimensional multivariate regression models in a neural semantic basis discovery experiment.

Second Place

William W. George Chair and ADVANCE Professor Pinar Keskinocak and Associate Professor Joel Sokol; ISyE graduates Hannah Smalley, Nishi Anand, Dylan Buczek, Tim Lin, Tanay Rajore, and Muriel Wacker; and Sridhar Basavaraju, Brian Gurbaxani, Teresa Hammett, and Matthew Kuehnert from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, received second place in the INFORMS Poster Competition for “Identification and Allocation of Increased-risk Encephalitis Organs.”

Honorable Mention

Ph.D. student Qiushi Chen; George Family Foundation Assistant Professor Turgay Ayer; and Jagpreet Chhatwal of Harvard Medical School and MGH received an honorable mention in the Public Sector Operations Research (PSOR) Best Paper Award Competition for “Optimal Liver Cancer Surveillance In Hepatitis C Infected Population.”

 Finalists

George Family Foundation Assistant Professor Turgay Ayer; Ph.D. students Anthony Bonifonte and Can Zhang; Anne Spaulding of Emory University; and Jagpreet Chhatwal of Harvard Medical School are finalists in the INFORMS Health Applications Society Best Paper Competition Award (Pierskalla Award) for “Prioritizing Hepatitis C Treatment in U.S. Prisons.”

George Family Foundation Assistant Professor Turgay Ayer and William W. George Chair and ADVANCE Professor Pinar Keskinocak; Ph.D. student Jia Yan; and Aaron Caughey from Oregon Health & Science University School of Medicine, are finalists in the INFORMS Poster Competition for “Incorporating Fairness and Women's Preferences into Down Syndrome Diagnosis Decisions.” 

Ph.D. student Xiaolei Fang, Assistant Professor Kamran Paynabar, and Georgia Power Associate Professor Nagi Gebraeel are finalists for the INFORMS Quality, Statistics, and Reliability Section’s Best Refereed Paper Finalist Award for “Residual Useful Lifetime Prediction Using a Degradation Image Stream.”

Ph.D. student Rui Gao, is a finalist for the George. E. Nicholson Student Paper Competition for "Distributionally Robust Stochastic Optimization with Wasserstein Distance," co-authored by Associate Professor Anton Kleywegt. 

Alvaro Lorca, former Ph.D student (now assistant professor at Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile), and Assistant Professor Andy Sun are finalists for the ENRE Student Paper Travel Award for "The Adaptive Robust Multi-Period Alternating Current Optimal Power Flow Problem,” given by the INFORMS Section on Energy, Natural Resources, and the Environment.

Ph.D. student Hao Yan, Assistant Professor Kamran Paynabar, and Carolyn J. Stewart Chair and Professor Jan Shi are finalists for the INFORMS Quality, Statistics, and Reliability Best Student Paper Competition, for “AKM2D: Adaptive Sensing for Online Anomaly Detection.”

Post-doctoral researcher Murat Yildirium, Assistant Professor Andy Sun, and Georgia Power Associate Professor Nagi Gebraeel are finalists for the INFORMS Quality, Statistics, and Reliability Best Student Paper Competition, for “Sensor-driven Condition-based Maintenance and Operations Scheduling of Power Plants in Electricity Systems.”

“We are pleased to support Georgia Tech’s Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering to attract diverse talent to the field of supply chain engineering,” said Akash Chauhan, Amazon’s vice president of North American operations. “Amazon has exciting opportunities available on our growing supply chain, logistics, engineering, and robotics teams, and our support of Georgia Tech will help prepare the next generation of leaders.”

To support this student experience, ISyE faculty have developed the new Systems Design Track for the MSSCE program. The track includes courses in mechatronics and robotics through Georgia Tech’s Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering, ranked second nationally, as well as a course in industrial systems design.  

“ISyE’s strengths line up very well with Amazon’s strengths and core competencies. Amazon is a leader in supply chain, fulfillment innovation as well as robotics, and ISyE – and Georgia Tech as a whole – fosters an environment focused on developing ‘what’s next,’” said SCL Managing Director Tim Brown.

Amazon seeks to attract and maintain a diverse professional workforce. Georgia Tech, with the largest engineering college in the U.S. – positioned in the top five in overall rankings – and ISyE, with its long-standing No. 1-ranked graduate and undergraduate programs, is uniquely positioned to help Amazon with this goal.

Georgia Tech graduates more female and minority engineers than any other university in the country and has long-established undergraduate transfer programs with historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs) or schools whose student base consists of mostly individuals who identify as a minority. This transfer program is the Regents’ Engineering Transfer Program (RETP). In support of Amazon’s diversity recruiting objectives, Amazon and Georgia Tech plan to leverage the RETP program and foster relationships with the HBCUs. As part of its financial support, Amazon will provide four fellowships to masters’ students in the supply chain engineering program at $12,000 per year for five years.

In addition, the MSSCE Systems Design track students will be given preferential consideration for internships with Amazon. Undergraduate diversity recruiting scholarships may also be awarded by Amazon.

That edition of Clean Old-fashioned Hate culminated with a thrilling Georgia Tech win, thanks to Butker’s kick, followed by defensive back D.J. White’s interception that ended the game at 30-24. The pair of plays have gone down in Tech football history as “the Kick and the Pick.”

While that kick – and 2015’s “Miracle on Techwood Drive” against Florida State, during which Butker kicked another game-tying FG – have endeared him eternally to the Tech faithful, Butker didn’t actually start playing football until his sophomore year at the Westminster Schools in Atlanta. He grew up playing soccer and basketball and tried out for the football team at the encouragement of his girlfriend and some of the older guys on the team.

“I wasn’t a football fan. I didn’t even understand the football positions until I got to college,” Butker recalls in a recent interview. “But I started kicking and was pretty decent, so then I started getting some scholarship offers. What stood out for me about Georgia Tech was the coaching staff and the team itself.”

“Coach [Paul] Johnson picks guys with good character,” he adds. “Just because you are a good athlete doesn’t mean you are going to get offered a scholarship. He makes sure you have good principles, and I felt that he cared about that more than just the football side.”

Butker will graduate in spring 2017. When asked what he’ll miss most about Georgia Tech, a lot of his memories are tied up in football: bonding with the team during morning workouts, Yellow Jacket Alley, playing on historic Grant Field at Bobby Dodd Stadium. “All the traditions are amazing,” Butker says.

But there are plenty of non-football memories he’s made as well: He has thoroughly enjoyed his ISyE classes and is currently active with Senior Design. And when not studying and not on the football field, he can be found at Tech’s Catholic Center.

“It’s a gem I didn’t know about,” he says, “and it’s another big reason I’m glad I chose Tech. My faith gives me the perspective that there’s a lot more out there besides football. When I first got here, it was everything football, and success, and getting accolades. My outlook on life has changed a lot. I don’t take comfort in those things like I used to.”

“If I look back on my life when I’m old,” Butker continues, “I think I’ll have had a successful life if I have a good family. If I raise my kids right, and in a good loving home, I’d be very proud, because that’s how my parents raised me, and that means a lot to me. So, to be a great father to my kids and a great husband, and have an impact on people’s lives.”

Butker, who is from Decatur, GA, has stayed close to home throughout his time at Tech. His parents have attended every football game that Butker has played in – including this year’s opening match-up against Boston College in Dublin, Ireland – except for one. Like many freshman, he would take home his laundry and get a hot meal from his mom on weekends. And although he doesn’t bring his laundry anymore, Butker still goes home on Sundays after game-day Saturdays and visits with his parents and both sets of grandparents, who live nearby.

His dad, also named Harrison, has played an integral role in Butker’s kicking career. He records Tech’s football games, and then together, the father/son duo watch Butker’s FGs and kickoffs. Butker holds a stopwatch to record his kicking times, and his dad tracks them in an Excel spreadsheet.

“I thought that’s all it was,” Butker laughs. But then he recently asked his dad send him the spreadsheet, and discovered that “it was incredibly elaborate. He’s taking into account wind and gravity with ball pressure and the trajectory of my kicks and the angle I want to kick them at. I’ve never seen a spreadsheet like that before. It was crazy."

Looking to the future – beyond this weekend’s annual renewal of the Yellow Jacket rivalry with the Bulldogs, and his obvious desire to go out with a win – Butker is hoping to keep his focus on sports.

“I’d love to give the NFL a shot,” he muses. “This spring I’ll be training for the NFL; maybe I can go to the NFL Scouting Combine. Not many kickers go, but it would be awesome to be in front of all those NFL coaches there. Pro Day is in March, and the draft is in late April. Regardless of what happens I’m looking forward to the opportunity and putting my best foot forward.”

He has also been thinking about how he can use his ISyE skills in coaching high school sports: “ISyE is great because you’re problem solving – not just with strategies you’re going to use to win – but also with the kids you’re around and how you can impact their lives.”

Interview Outtakes

On preparing for “the Kick” at UGA: “If you look at the TV broadcast of it, [before the FG] I ran over and did my practice steps and swing-through. I got disoriented as to where I thought the ‘ball’ was, because you just kind of have to pick a spot in the grass to swing through. I almost tripped and fell, and I thought, ‘Great – probably the biggest kick of my career, and I just almost fell over doing a practice swing.’”

On his mental approach as a kicker: “To this day, when I watch kickers on TV, I get nervous for them. During a game, you don’t think about the situation as much – you just kick the ball. As a kicker, you don’t want to be too invested in what’s happening. You want to be even-keeled. You have to stay somewhat removed from it.”

On being elected team captain this year: “I was surprised, and I think Coach Johnson was a little surprised. I didn’t think there was any way the team would vote me in as captain, but they did. I was very humbled. It meant a lot to me. I love talking with the guys on the team, being there for them, and helping them with whatever they’ve got going on. I always want to lead by example.”

ISyE junior Kaitlin Rizk has pursued helping with issues related to women’s empowerment – particularly sanitation – with a single-minded focus in her extracurricular activities at Georgia Tech. In addition to her work with Days for Girls, which she discusses extensively in this interview, Rizk’s collegiate activities have included:

• Participating in Grand Challenges as part of the STEMpower team, dedicated to improving the confidence and performance of young girls who are passionate about STEM through creative new programming in collaboration with the Girl Scouts of America;
• Founding the club She’s the First, which supports a girl’s school tuition in Ethiopia and raises awareness about women’s issues surrounding education;
• Planning the Women’s Leadership Conference at Georgia Tech, which empowers women at Tech to be bold and grow professionally and personally;
• Interning with Improve International, a young nonprofit organization dedicated to promoting accountability, learning, and innovation to better coordinate the efforts of international organizations working in the areas of sanitation and safe water in developing nations.

Why did you choose Georgia Tech for college, and ISyE for your major?

I chose Georgia Tech as my college because I wanted to study industrial engineering, and Georgia Tech is No. 1 in this area. I want to do IE because my dream job is to consult with NGOs working on women’s issues, and IE will provide me with the perfect problem-solving skill set to do this.

Who is your biggest role model, and why?

My biggest role models are my parents, both extremely intelligent, hardworking people. My dad is always there to help me with any engineering problem, and my mom introduced me to working on women’s empowerment. She specifically encouraged me to start a club in high school to support girls’ education in the developing world.

You have participated in projects related to women’s empowerment – from STEM to sanitation – since high school. What was initially motivating to you about this group of issues?

As women, we can be so powerful and induce so much change in the world. I feel empowered as a female engineer; I feel like I can control anything in my life. I think all women should have these opportunities.

Unfortunately, all over the world women are restrained, put down, and held back. I first noticed this when I learned that girls drop out of school to take care of their families and homes. This isn’t fair to them, so I began researching why this happens to them. I want to work to change anything that holds girls and women back.

You’ve been an undergraduate researcher with the Center for Health & Humanitarian Systems, which is where you became involved with Days for Girls (DFG). What drew you to this project?

Girls in developing countries frequently don’t attend school when they are on their period. They lack access to basic information about their body’s biological functions, as well not having access to pads during their periods.

DFG supports women and girls having access to reusable pads and reproductive health education. With pads and education about their bodies, we hope girls feel comfortable attending school while on their period. After distributing pads to girls, the percentage of girls staying in school increases.

So much of your extracurricular activities at Georgia Tech have involved working with women around sanitation and menstrual issues in developing countries. Why have you chosen to focus your time attention here?

Why is a normal biological function something that affects a woman’s life in so many negative ways? Talking about menstruation should not be taboo. I work on this issue so that people will realize that having a period is a normal part of life. Women and girls should not have to feel ashamed about it.

Tell readers something about the issue(s) of women’s empowerment that they may not already know.

People often do not realize that menstrual hygiene management (MHM) affects so many issues in women’s lives. Girls do not have to feel shame and embarrassment about having their period if boys and girls are educated about MHM and understand that it is a natural thing. With access to pads, girls stay in school the entire month and do not fall behind what the boys are learning.

DFG came across a case where a girl was forced to have sex with her male teachers in exchange for pads. Once she learned how to make her own DFG pads, she was empowered to free herself and help her friends avoid a similar situation. The power of having menstrual pads is unbelievable.

You spent the summer in Uganda as part of a humanitarian project. Describe what you did in Uganda, and why it was important for you to be involved in this project.

In Uganda I worked for DFG. A center here makes reusable pads and distributes them to local communities in two different ways.

First, DFG conducts trainings for girls all over Uganda where they teach the girls reproductive health and how to sew the DFG kit. The kit contains reusable pads, and it comes in a pretty bag that girls can carry around like a backpack for their pads. Second, DFG distributes kits by selling them in the local community. Women can start a micro-enterprise selling kits and homemade soap. This empowers women to improve their lives and help their communities while making a profit to sustain themselves.

My role at DFG was to develop both an inventory and an ordering system that improves kit production. The inventory system helped us find optimal ordering quantities of our fabrics and manage our production. The ordering system is a way to manage the large volume of orders we have for kits at the center. Both of these systems have involved significant collaboration and patience of the DFG staff to help me understand the processes already in place and develop the best options for them.

Can you share an anecdote that illustrates the importance of the work you’re doing?

During my time in Uganda, I traveled to Karamoja, one of the most impoverished and neglected regions of Uganda. We taught reproductive health and trained over 250 girls on how to make the DFG kit. Each day, we taught 30 girls at a time in a classroom. It was one of the hardest experiences of my life because I saw firsthand all of the issues I had read about related to women’s empowerment.

Some of the girls were 14 and already had babies that they brought to the training. During lunch I talked with many of the girls and told them of my hope to stay in school and not get married until I am 30. They thought I was strange.

However, I did meet girls who were young, unmarried, and still in school. I spoke to them about how well they could do if they continued in school. With their new DFG kit, these girls will not have to miss three to five days of school each month. They now have knowledge about hygiene and how their bodies work. Additionally, they know how to protect themselves against rape from men in their communities, as self-defense against sexual assault is part of the curriculum we teach in the trainings.

Each day when I worked on the DFG inventory system, I thought of how many more kits we can make. More girls can have access to the training that gives them good resources and empowers them to change their situations.  

How do you plan to continue your work for women’s empowerment now that you've returned to the U.S.?

I plan to continue to work for DFG by analyzing the data I collected from the tracking system set in place for inventory. I will stay engaged with the workers in Uganda and continue to improve the production of the center there. I also will continue to make period kits with my friends in Atlanta.

What are your post-graduation plans?

When I graduate, I plan to do consulting for an NGO that works on MHM or women’s empowerment. I want to learn as much as I can at Georgia Tech, so that I can help these organizations improve on their business side.

Kimbrough had countless thoughts running through his mind while counting down to Wednesday's 4:05 a.m. (EST) lift-off. Systems checks. Equipment. The months to come. But what weighed on him most is family.

“I already miss them,” Kimbrough said during an interview with Georgia Tech last month from Star City, Russia.

It was the second time this summer Kimbrough talked with Georgia Tech, and both times, when asked about the preparation for such a long mission, he quickly mentioned his wife and three children. He’s missing his twin daughters’ first semesters at college this fall and much of his son’s junior year of high school in the Houston, TX, area. 

“Being a military officer, deployments and being gone are nothing new,” said Kimbrough, who served in Operation Desert Storm and is a retired Army colonel. “But I’m realizing that it’s not any easier. In fact, it’s probably harder because of the age of my kids.”

This is Kimbrough’s second trip to space. He flew in 2008 aboard the space shuttle Endeavour for a 16-day mission, far different from the four months or so he’ll spend away from family during this trek. But in a few ways, the missions are similar. The main job for his shuttle mission was to deliver and install equipment that expanded ISS living quarters to accommodate a six-person crew. Three people are already on the space station, so Kimbrough and his crewmates will make six when they arrive on Friday.

Also, just like in 2008, Kimbrough is scheduled for two spacewalks, tentatively set for January.

This time, however, his main mission on the station is to conduct the science experiments.

“A lot of the experiments will be done on our bodies,” he said. “For instance, we’re going to look at mini-exercise devices. In order to get to places like Mars, we’ll need to develop really small things to put in capsules. I’m one of the first people to get to try them, so I’m looking forward to that.” 

Kimbrough is one of two Georgia Tech alumni selected to live on the ISS this year. Tim Kopra (MSAE 95) was commander of the station for four of his six months in orbit (he left in June). Kimbrough will assume command at the end of the month.

Kimbrough grew up in Smyrna, GA, attending Georgia Tech football and basketball games. His plan was to play baseball at Tech, but life took him to the United States Military Academy after President Ronald Reagan wrote an appointment letter on his behalf. He earned an aerospace engineering degree at West Point, served in Operation Desert Storm, and eventually came back to campus to study operations research in the Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering. 

“It was nice to be home after moving around so much while in the military,” Kimbrough said. “I always wanted to be an astronaut, but it’s such a long shot to be chosen. When I look back on it, having a master’s degree from Georgia Tech was a huge stepping stone.”

The next step takes him 210 miles above Earth to an orbiting lab that moves 17,000 miles per hour. Fortunately, he’ll have a few reminders of home. He’s bringing a flag that waved on the Ramblin’ Wreck. He’s also taking a camera and plans to snap photos of Georgia Tech and other schools he attended.

“I’ll also have a few Tech football games piped up to the station. That will keep me going.”

(You can follow Kimbrough on Twitter and Instagram @astro_kimbrough).

Georgia Tech has produced 14 astronauts, tied for second-most among public universities. They include John Young (BSAE 52), who walked on the moon and was on the first space shuttle, and Sandy Magnus (Ph.D. MSE 96), who flew on the last one. When Kimbrough flew on Endeavour in 2008, he was joined by Magnus and Eric Boe (MSEE 97).
 

The Golden Goose Award honors scientists whose federally funded work may have been considered silly, odd, or obscure when first conducted, but has resulted in significant benefits to society.

Along with Cornell University professor Thomas Seeley and data scientist Sunil Nakrani (who received his M.S. in computer science in 1998 from Tech and also completed post-doctoral work with Tovey), the team studied honey bee foraging behavior and the development of the Honey Bee Algorithm to allocate shared webservers to internet traffic. The original honey bee research, funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and Office of Naval Research, unexpectedly led to the algorithm that major web-hosting companies now use to streamline internet services and increase revenues in a global market worth more than $50 billion.

“The bees turned out to be even smarter than we thought,” said Tovey. The team developed a model for how the colonies’ decentralized foraging system works, which Tovey and Nakrani adapted over a decade later to develop the Honey Bee Algorithm for allocating shared web hosting servers to variable internet traffic. Their algorithm beats the competition by up to 20 percent in revenue generation for the web hosts and ensures servers are serving the applications internet clients need, when they need them.

The team is being cited for their curiosity-driven research on how honey bee foragers are able to maximize nectar collection in ever-changing environments.

“The ISyE faculty members who were recently presented with the Golden Goose Award deserve this recognition for not only their research, but for their vision and commitment to connect science with societal needs,” said Gary S. May, dean of Georgia Tech’s College of Engineering and Southern Company Chair. “It reaffirms the fact that engineers are creative problem-solvers who have the ingenuity to develop solutions. The impact of the Honey Bee Algorithm will increase as internet use continues to climb worldwide.”

Bartholdi, Tovey, and Vande Vate were inspired to study honey bee foraging after Vande Vate heard Seeley describing his own honey bee research on National Public Radio. “I wonder if the bees would do any better if they hired us as consultants?” Vande Vate mused to his colleagues after hearing the program. The tongue-in-cheek question led to a years-long examination of the honey bees’ decentralized foraging patterns from a systems engineering perspective.

Today, major web-hosting companies are using Tovey and Nakrani’s Honey Bee Algorithm and other similar biologically-inspired methods to boost revenues and more efficiently allocate their servers. Every internet user benefits when servers are ready in the right place and in the shortest time.

“The internet is one of mankind’s greatest accomplishments, and these scientists studied one of the smallest parts of nature to make it better,” said Rep. Jim Cooper (D-TN), who had the original idea to create the Golden Goose Award. “Their ingenuity is the kind of talent that makes America’s scientific and research community the best in the world.”

All five researchers who worked on the honey bee project -- Bartholdi, Nakrani, Seeley, Tovey, and Vande Vate -- accepted the award in a ceremony held at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. on September 22, 2016, with about 500 people in attendance. The ceremony included speeches by several congressional representatives, as well as the president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Geraldine L. Richmond. Official congratulations were read into the Congressional Record. 

About the ISyE Recipients of the Golden Goose Award

John Bartholdi III is the Manhattan Associates/Dabbiere Chair in ISyE and the co-executive director of the Georgia Tech Panama Logistics Innovation & Research Center in Panama. Bartholdi teaches supply chain issues, primarily warehousing, at both the undergraduate and graduate levels and in SCL's professional education program. His research centers on problems in warehousing and distribution, but he reserves some time to pursue wider-ranging interests, including mechanics, politics, computer science, geography, and biology. He was named a Presidential Young Investigator by the NSF for 1984-1989.

His research work has been supported by the Defense Logistics Agency, the Office of Naval Research, and the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, among others.

Craig Tovey is a professor and Stewart Faculty Fellow in ISyE with a courtesy appointment in the College of Computing at Tech. He also co-directs CBID, the Georgia Tech Center for Biologically Inspired Design

Tovey's principal research and teaching activities are in operations research and its interdisciplinary applications to social and natural systems, with emphasis on sustainability, the environment, and energy. His current research concerns inverse optimization for electric grid management, classical and biomimetic algorithms for robots and webhosting, the behavior of animal groups, sustainability measurement, and political polarization.

He received a Presidential Young Investigator Award from the NSF in 1985 and the 1989 Jacob Wolfowitz Prize for research in heuristics. He was granted a Senior Research Associateship from the National Research Council in 1990, was named an Institute Fellow at Georgia Tech in 1994, and received the Georgia Tech Class of 1934 Outstanding Interdisciplinary Activity Award in 2011.

John Vande Vate, a professor in ISyE, is the founder and executive director of Georgia Tech's Executive Master's in International Logistics and Supply Chain Strategy (EMIL-SCS) program. He held visiting professor positions at MIT Sloan School of Management, Carnegie Mellon Tepper School of Business, and the University of Pittsburgh’s Department of Economics, among others.

During the past 30 years, he has consulted for a variety of companies on a range of management science applications. His research has been published in Econometrica, Mathematics of Operations Research, Operations Research, Mathematical Programming, Questa, Journal of Theoretical Biology, Mechanics of Structures and Machines, and other established journals.

Vande Vate served on the board of the Supply Chain Council as the global treasurer and was named among Supply & Demand Chain Executive's Pros to Know in 2006.

Connelly, who received an ARCS Scholar Award in the amount of $7,500, is a first-time ARCS award recipient. His research focuses on efficiently solving time-dependent integer programming problems, both in theory and in practice.  He is seeking to improve a theoretical framework used to solve these problems, and, in parallel, is working with an airline to implement a time-discretized model to address workforce challenges they are facing.

“I was drawn to the ISyE department due to the range and depth of research areas I would be able to explore,” he said. “The possibility to pursue both my interests in advancing fundamental theory as well having the opportunity to implement ideas in practice was very attractive. The fact that Georgia Tech was located in such an amazing city as Atlanta was simply an added bonus.”

Connelly’s anticipated graduation date is spring 2020.

The Roche/ARCS Foundation Award in the amount of $7,500 represents the second ARCS award for Musselman, who plans to finish her dissertation early next summer.

Her research interest focuses on applied optimization, in particular as it relates to renewable energy and national security challenges. For her dissertation, she is studying three problems in these areas. Two of these problems are related to electricity development: One focuses on challenges specific to sub-Saharan Africa, and the other addresses the impacts of wind variability. The third project she is working on involves selecting resources to defend against the illicit transport of nuclear material.

“I've always been interested in research problems that I hope will have some positive societal impact,” Musselman said. “Receiving the ARCS award twice now has encouraged me that other people care about what I'm doing and think it's meaningful as well.”

Xu’s current research interest focuses on data, learning, and decision-making. Specifically, he is interested in machine learning, high-dimensional statistics, robust and stochastic optimization, sequential decision making, and application to large-scale systems.

He is currently an associate editor of both IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence and Computational Management Science.

Xu received his B. Eng. from Shanghai Jiaotong University in 1997, his M. Eng from the National University of Singapore in 2003, and his Ph. D. from McGill University in 2009. Before joining Georgia Tech, he was an assistant professor at the National University of Singapore, after a postdoctoral stint at the University of Texas at Austin.

He is also member of INFORMS and the Mathematical Optimization Society.

Overview of the Akaike Memorial Lecture Award

The ISM and the JSS have inaugurated the Akaike Memorial Lecture Award under the organizations’ joint sponsorship. The Akaike Memorial Lecture Award is named after the late Hirotugu Akaike, who left a wide-reaching and influential legacy of research in the statistical sciences.

Every two years, one lecturer is selected under the standards of the Akaike Memorial Lecture Award nominating committee from among those individuals who have, like Akaike, stood out as being ahead of their time, exercising an international influence over a wide range of fields in the statistical sciences (including mathematical sciences such as control and optimization, and mathematical engineering) and applied fields.

The lecture and follow-up discussion will be published as an invited paper in the Annals of the Institute of Statistical Mathematics (AISM) or the Journal of the Japan Statistical Society (JJSS).

Overview of Professor Wu’s Research Accomplishments

Wu has been a vigorous pioneer in the theory of experimental design, EM algorithms, and resampling. His research has addressed a broad spectrum of topics in statistics; some of his particularly notable accomplishments are described below.

He proposed a general optimal design algorithm using the fact that approximate optimal design problems become constrained convex problems and proved that they converge asymptotically to the optimal design. He examined the convergence of the celebrated EM algorithms and obtained results under conditions that are applicable to most practical problems. He also made key contributions to the justification of the bootstrapping and jackknife methods from the viewpoint of mathematical statistics.

As experimental design methods were quickening the development of new products and technologies in Japanese industry in the early 1990s, Wu used advances in statistical methods to propose fundamental revisions to experimental design, based on the agricultural methods of R. A. Fisher and the robust parameter design method of Genichi Taguchi. He developed a new method called "conditional main effect analysis" for distinguishing among the effects of configuration, sparsity, the principle of transmission, and aliasing in factorial experiments, thereby contributing greatly to the development of the technometrics field.

Recently, Wu has devoted attention to virtual experiments on computers, in search of principles beyond those identified by Fisher for problems examined with numerical experiments.

• Anne Schuchat, MD and Rear Admiral, U.S. Public Health Service; Principal Deputy Director, Centers for Disease Control & Prevention (CDC)
• Michelle Nunn, President and CEO, CARE USA, who will be interviewed by Dr. Sanjay Gupta of CNN

The 2016 HHL Conference will feature plenary panels and interactive workshops on a variety of topics related to supply chain management and logistics in global health and humanitarian response and development, as well as poster sessions on innovative research and ample opportunities for networking. Information on speakers, panel topics, health and humanitarian site visits is available at: https://chhs.gatech.edu/conference/. You may register now for the conference at: https://chhs.gatech.edu//conference/registration/reg.php.

Plenary panel topics will focus on the below topics.

• Strengthening Public Health Systems
  
• Supply Chain Complexities in Refugee Crisis Response
• Designing Supply Chains for Health Emergencies
• Sudden Onset Disasters: Matching Supply with Demand

For additional information about the conference, visit https://chhs.gatech.edu/node/52/541981

Why did you choose Georgia Tech for your college experience, and ISyE for your major?

I have always been a Jackets fan. My father and grandfather went to Georgia Tech, so the school was always on my radar. When I began researching degrees and careers in high school, industrial engineering seemed like a calling. The problems we solve can be applied to any business. I couldn’t have been more excited when I learned the best school for IE was Georgia Tech!

Starting with your undergraduate internships, you have gained extensive experience working for utilities of various types. What interests you so much about this sector?

We depend on electricity for so much. The balance between reliability and cost is key. I think the constant innovation attracted me to this field.

In addition to your internships with various utilities, were you involved in any other environmental or sustainability work while at Georgia Tech?

Early on in my undergraduate career, I joined the Georgia Tech Trailblazers. This club organizes outdoor service trips for students to national and local parks, offering students a great way to travel and explore while giving back to environment. I loved having a healthy outlet from school to take my mind off of my classes, and by my senior year at Tech I had become president of the club.

What would you say is the most important issue in terms of sustainability right now?

There are so many ways to live a more sustainable lifestyle: becoming politically involved in sustainability issues, eating less meat, creating less trash, biking instead of driving. I know firsthand how hard it is to understand what effects our actions have on the environment around us. If we dedicated more time to educating ourselves, I think we would be able to find a good balance with the environment.

Describe what you do as a commodity leader for Upwind Solutions.

At Upwind Solutions, I buy and sell spare parts for wind turbines all over the U.S. I work with Upwind’s suppliers to locally source parts, so I can provide them to my customers quickly and cheaply, and work with other engineers to develop solutions to increase turbine reliability and decrease downtime. This improves the value companies get from investing in wind power, making it a more attractive option.

What is your favorite part of your job?

I like getting to work with people in all different parts of the industry. I get to talk to everyone: wind technicians in the field, corporate buyers, transportation logistics people, and parts suppliers.

Share an anecdote that illustrates the importance of the work you’re doing.

When a turbine is down, money is being lost, so getting the necessary part to the wind site quickly is critical. It always feels good to hear that a part I sourced was able to get the turbine working again.

How does your ISyE background, and in particular your focus on supply chains, impact what you do at work?

Parts consumption forecasting is very important to my department, and lets us predict which parts to stock. My ISyE degree gave me the skills I need to forecast, source, and stock the parts that will help our customers the most.

You’re involved with the organization Women of Wind Energy. How do you participate in this organization, and why is it integral to what you’re currently doing?

I feel so lucky to work for a company with many intelligent, hard­working female role models in senior management, but historically, women have been underrepresented in the wind energy field. Women of Wind Energy hosts events that offer networking opportunities and encourage hiring and promotion of women in all sectors of the wind industry.

Where do you see yourself in three to five years?

As e­commerce takes off and we have more data, parts forecasting will improve significantly. I want to be the Amazon of spare turbine parts.

You’re originally from the Atlanta area. What was it like to move all the way across the country to San Diego?

I fell in love with San Diego after a visit during my junior year at Tech. I started to utilize my network to target jobs in San Diego, and it worked. After graduation, I had two weeks to pack up my apartment in Atlanta and drive to California with my sister before my new job started. It was the road trip of a lifetime. I am loving the West Coast.

What do you like to do outside of work?

I love traveling, so on the weekends I explore the beaches, mountains, and deserts when I can. San Diego has an amazing zoo, so I spend a little too much time watching baby animals. To fill the void after leaving Trailblazers, I have joined a club called CropSwap that picks excess fruit from farms for food bank donation. And in the fall, I meet up with the San Diego Georgia Tech Alumni chapter to watch football games. Go Jackets!

So what’s in the files? The ISyE Health Analytics group has, over time, bought 500 billion of Medicaid claims from the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), a federal agency. The claims date back nearly 10 years, from 2005-2012. For two of those years, Tech has all of the claims filed in the entire United States; for the rest of the period, the claims of 14 states located mostly in the Southeast.  

The claims allow the team to study how people use the health care system: how many times they went to the doctor, if and when they filled a prescription, if they went to the specialist they were referred to, or how many times they’ve been to the emergency room or otherwise hospitalized. The data also includes what costs were associated with each doctor, specialist, or hospital visit, and what drives those costs — so they can study how to increase cost efficiency on a systemic level. The CMS data project is a collaborative effort with Georgia Tech’s Institute for People and Technology, the GT Pediatric Technology Center, and the Georgia Department of Public Health. IPaT supports the purchase, curation, security and access to this sensitive data on behalf of the GT research community.

To read more about the Health Analytics group's work with this data set, click here: http://b.gatech.edu/2ba2VBT.

In the following interview, Martin reveals her passion for her chosen sport, what motivates her during a hard practice, and why she chose ISyE for her major.

Did volleyball specifically bring you to Georgia Tech, and if so, why?

I decided to attend Georgia Tech because it offered a complete package including its excellent academic standards and rich athletic tradition, but volleyball was the means by which I was introduced to Tech. The atmosphere at Tech for volleyball was unlike any other campus I visited. I first experienced Georgia Tech volleyball as a spectator, and I was blown away at how much the Institute supports the sport – and athletics overall. The support from students, faculty, alumni, and fans all make playing volleyball in O’Keefe Gymnasium a unique – and loud – experience. The fervor for volleyball on campus really sold me on coming to Georgia Tech.

Describe what your position – setter – does on the volleyball team.

The setter acts like the quarterback on a football team. She is responsible for running the offense, calling plays, and distributing the ball to the hitters. The setter has the most demanding mental job on the court. Before each serve, a setter must assess the other team’s defense, decide which hitter has the best match up, and then make the set. The mental aspect of the position is one of the main reasons why I chose to play it.

What keeps you going during a hard practice or a challenging game?

One of the main things that helps me during an especially hard practice is my love for “the grind,” and knowing that I will be better for it in the long run. Growing up, I ran to stay in shape for some of the other sports I played at the time, and for training, I would run up a hill that was about a mile of gradual incline. Every time I looked up from the road when I ran, I would still see the seemingly endless hill and wonder if I would ever get to the top. Eventually I would, and the satisfaction of reaching the top made that mile of grind worth the results. My lessons learned from that hill have given me the mental strength to push through the tough practices. 

Describe your favorite volleyball-related moment so far here at Tech.

I will have to cheat and pick two favorite moments. 

In my freshman year, we had a weeknight match against Clemson at home in O’Keefe Gym. Because the match was on a weeknight, we did not have the normal student and fan turnout. However, the Language Institute in the O’Keefe Building had an event, and many of the students came to the game.  The atmosphere was similar to that of an international soccer game. Our students were chanting and cheering the entire time, with both the typical cheers at our weekend matches, as well as chants they made up on their own. The support really played a role in our success that game, and we used the home court advantage to defeat Clemson! 

The second experience was a bit more recent: this past year when we defeated Duke for the first time since November 2007, and the first time we swept Duke since November 2004. They have had very disciplined and strong teams that are tough to beat, and our team knew that this match would be a battle. It took a full team effort with many teammates stepping up, but we pulled off a historic win in front of a great student crowd.

Why did you choose ISyE for your major?

Before attending Georgia Tech, I knew I wanted to major in either business or engineering. ISyE allows me to do both. In high school, I liked my math and science classes, but I also liked by economics and business classes. The combination of technical tools and business concepts are the best fit for my strengths, and ISyE’s real-life problem solving are the best fit for my interests. 

As I have taken more classes within my major, I have realized just how versatile this engineering discipline can be.  Unlike more technical engineering disciplines, ISyE is not confined to a few industries but can be applied to problems in essentially any industry and for any company.

How do you balance the demands of your sport with your schoolwork?

Collegiate athletics have about the same time demands as a 30-hour/week job.

Our typical week during season includes morning lifting two days a week, practices every afternoon, film sessions, treatment and rehab, light practices on weekends, and of course the matches. On the weekends we travel, our team leaves Thursday nights after afternoon practice return Sunday evening after our Sunday afternoon match. This could be overwhelming, but the athletes at Tech are fortunate to have a great academic staff that help schedule classes, schedule tutoring, and give other academic advice.

In addition to the available resources, I also take time at the beginning of every week and every day to plan when I will study. I assess priorities and estimate how much time each assignment might take me to complete, and then I find pockets of time in my schedule to fit them in. My emphasis on scheduling and time management have been a large contribution to my success here at Georgia Tech.

What is something not many people know about you?

If you see me on campus, I almost always have my earbuds in my ears, and you might think I am rocking out to my favorite music. But actually, I listen to audiobooks while walking around campus! When I was younger, I really loved to read, but now that I have more time demands in college, I haven’t been able to find time to dedicate to my hobby. With my audiobooks, I’ve been able to “read” a lot of books that I normally don’t have time for. 

Where do you see yourself headed in the future?

While some collegiate volleyball players continue to play overseas professionally, I see myself joining the workforce.  As far as my plans for industry and position, I suppose only time will tell. But until I graduate, I will be focusing on finishing my last volleyball season strong, staying on top of my studies, and job searching.

The Test of Time Award recognizes “papers published between 10 and 25 years ago that have had significant impact on research or applications that exemplify the interplay of economics and computation,” said David Pennock, on behalf of the award committee. The two winning papers, selected by unanimous vote of the award committee, have influenced “a thriving subfield of computational social choice. In many ways, these papers catalyzed an entire field.”

The first winning paper, written by Bartholdi and MIT Sloan School of Management Professor James Orlin, is “Single Transferable Vote Resists Strategic Voting,” which appeared in the journal Social Choice in 1991.

The second winning paper, written by Bartholdi, Tovey, and then-ISyE graduate student Michael Trick (M.S. OR 1984, Ph.D. IE 1987) is “How Hard Is It to Control an Election?”, which appeared in the journal Mathematical and Computer Modelling in 1992.

Tovey and Trick (now associate dean of research and a professor of operations research at Carnegie Mellon University) will travel in July to the 2016 ACM Conference on Economics and Computation in the Netherlands to accept the award and give a presentation on the work.

About the Award-winning Papers

These two papers helped start the now-flourishing field of computational social choice, a blend of voting theory from economics with complexity and algorithmic analysis from operations research and computer science.

“Single Transferable Vote Resists Strategic Voting” discusses how a “strategic vote” is a vote cast to tilt an election by voting other than one’s true preferences. This is troubling because it seems contrary to the purpose of voting, which is to elicit the true opinion of the electorate. The Gibbard-Satterthwaite-Gärdenfors theorems famously proved that every minimally fair voting system is susceptible to manipulation by strategic voting. Bartholdi and Orlin proved that the system of voting known as “single transferrable vote” (STV) is resistant to manipulation, even though susceptible in theory. That is, when votes are to be tabulated by STV, it can be computationally difficult – and therefore impractical – to devise a strategic vote that will advance one’s true objectives. Furthermore, STV seems to be unique in this regard among voting schemes in common use.

In “How Hard Is It to Control an Election?”, Bartholdi, Tovey, and Trick proposed the search for voting systems that are computationally resistant to attacks by the addition or disqualification of candidates or voters.  They proved that of two popular systems, one is resistant to attacks on voters, and the other is resistant to attacks on candidates. 

About John Bartholdi

Bartholdi, as well as being an ISyE professor, serves as Co-Executive Director of the Georgia Tech - Panama Logistics Innovation and Research Center. He teaches supply chain issues, primarily warehousing, at both the undergraduate and graduate levels and in SCL's professional education program. His research centers on problems in warehousing and distribution, but he reserves some time to pursue wider-ranging interests, including mechanics, politics, computer science, geography, biology, and, more recently, public transit (he is the co-creator of the software that coordinates buses on the Georgia Tech campus).

He was named a Presidential Young Investigator by the National Science Foundation (NSF) for 1984-1989 and received the IIE Innovation Award in 1999. His research has been supported by the Defense Logistics Agency, the Office of Naval Research, and the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, among others.

Bartholdi graduated in 1968 with a B.S. degree in mathematics from the University of Florida and then served two tours of duty in Southeast Asia as a paratrooper in a Naval Special Warfare unit. He returned to the University of Florida to complete the Ph.D. program in operations research in 1977 and later served on the faculties at the University of Michigan, the Shanghai Institute of Mechanical Engineering, the National University of Singapore, and Stellenbosch University.

About Craig Tovey

In addition to serving as an ISyE professor, Tovey also co-directs CBID, the Georgia Tech Center for Biologically Inspired Design.

His principal research and teaching activities are in operations research and its interdisciplinary applications to social and natural systems, with emphasis on sustainability, the environment, and energy. His current research concerns inverse optimization for electric grid management, classical and biomimetic algorithms for robots and webhosting, the behavior of animal groups, sustainability measurement, and political polarization.

Tovey received a Presidential Young Investigator Award from the NSF in 1985 and the 1989 Jacob Wolfowitz Prize for research in heuristics. He was granted a Senior Research Associateship from the National Research Council in 1990, was named an Institute Fellow at Georgia Tech in 1994, and received the Class of 1934 Outstanding Interdisciplinary Activity Award in 2011.

He received an A.B. in applied mathematics from Harvard College in 1977 and both an M.S. in computer science and a Ph.D. in operations research from Stanford University in 1981.

Baseball, after all, has been a stats-driven sport for decades, and its fans are well versed in the value of BA, ERA, WHIP and even OPS and BABIP. And football not only employs an endless array of complex, drawn-up plays and schemes on both sides of the ball, but also collects and critically analyzes data on its players’ physical attributes and skills—such as height, speed, bench press repetitions and even hand size—like few other sports do.

Not long after NHL executives started looking beyond their scouts to bring in non-traditional voices into the decision-making processes that shape their multimillion dollar franchises, Alexandra Mandrycky, IE 13, was ready to be heard.

Although watching and studying hockey was merely a growing hobby while she worked on her industrial engineering degree at Tech, Mandrycky realized that the data analytics she picked up from the sport also applied to her undergraduate classes. After she got out of Tech, Mandrycky decided to pursue data analytics in the hopes it could make following hockey something much more than a pastime.

Mandrycky’s own shot at securing a job with an NHL squad first came through a consultant gig with the Minnesota Wild last September. In January, that turned into a full-time position as a hockey operations analyst. “It’s still surreal that I’m working for a pro hockey team,” Mandrycky says. “It says a lot about the Minnesota Wild that they are open to outside voices.”

Read the rest of Mandrycky's profile here: http://bit.ly/29noiO5.

More than 58 percent of Georgia’s children – about 1.5 million youngsters –  qualify for public dental benefits through the state’s Medicaid and PeachCare for Kids programs, according to a new Georgia Tech study. Unfortunately, of the 3,872 licensed dentists providing provide preventive services in Georgia, just 337 – 8.7 percent – accept public insurance for children, according to InsureKidsNow.gov.

Research conducted by scientists in the Health Analytics Group at Georgia Tech details the extreme oral health care disparities between children eligible for public insurance and those whose families can afford care through other financial means.   

Considering common access barriers, there are roughly 865,000 Medicaid- or PeachCare-eligible children in Georgia who need to travel to reach a dental provider for preventive care services more than the state standards. (The standards are driving distances to a provider of 30 muinutes or 30 miles for urban areas and 45 minutes or 45 miles for rural areas.)

They also must travel, on average, 10 or more miles farther than children with private insurance or ability to afford of out-of-pocket care expenses to reach a dental provider.

Locations of communities where parents of children eligible for public insurance have to travel to reach a dental provider longer distances with 10 miles than those with private insurance or those with ability to afford of out-of-pocket care.

The study also found that there are more than 500,000 children in Georgia whose parents will probably forgo preventive dental care for their children because of lack of financial means to pay out-of-pocket care, or lack of public or private insurance.

To address the problem, the Georgia Tech study found, 30 percent of Georgia dentists –  1,160 – would have to accept public insurance to achieve state standards for access to care for almost 100 percent of Medicaid-eligible children in large cities and approximately 85 percent in smaller urban and rural areas.

To provide dental care for these children at “equitable levels” with those whose parents can afford the care would require that 50 percent of Georgia dentists accept public insurance reimbursement.

Tooth decay is the No. 1 childhood chronic disease, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). It not only results in pain and lack of concentration, but also can result in facial disfiguration from swelling, nutritional deficiencies from inability to chew and potentially deadly infection. Lack of access to dental care also leads to missed school days for children and missed work days for their parents.

The Georgia Tech research demonstrates that an urgent plan of action is needed to ensure lower-income Georgia children receive the oral health care they so desperately need.

Among the strategies to reduce oral health disparities among lower-income children, the researchers propose providing grants to health centers that provide dental services, increasing Medicaid acceptance rates among dentists, and offering dentists federal assistance for dental school loans if they agree to relocate to dental shortage areas.

One strategy highlighted by the researchers was the focus of legislation proposed during the 2016 Georgia General Assembly session. The legislation would have enabled licensed dental hygienists to provide essential preventive dental care, such as fluoride treatment and applying sealants, without direct supervision of dentists, which is defined as requiring a dentist to be present on site for the procedures.

The legislation would have expanded that policy, which applies now to prisoners and those seen at public health dental sites, to include state-insured children as well as underserved people in nursing homes, federally qualified health centers and non-profit health care facilities. Unfortunately the measure met opposition from dentists and died in the House Rules Committee.

This op-ed originally appeared online on July 8, 2016, at Georgia Public Policy Foundation: http://www.georgiapolicy.org/2016/07/georgia-must-correct-dental-care-disparities/.

"We are proud of the continued excellence emerging from ISyE. This ranking further validates what we've known all along: that the quality of our program and its graduates is among highest in the nation. It reaffirms our confidence in our ability to provide students with experiences and skill sets that support success in the work place and make them life-long learners," said Dima Nazzal, executive director of academic administration and student experience at ISyE.

Gartner ranked 51 universities nationwide with undergraduate programs on program scope, industry value, and program size, gathering data through surveys and interviews of industry professionals and academics. The company highlighted program size as being particularly important because of continued demand for talent within the field. Georgia Tech scored as the highest-ranked program leader based on size.

That’s because Siesser (B.S. industrial engineering 2014, M.S. analytics 2015) has something that companies covet: the knowledge and skill to help predict the future.

“A lot of what I do can be used to predict the success of a marketing and advertising campaign,” says Siesser, who works for Atlanta-based business intelligence firm Cardlytics. “For example, we use credit card transaction data to evaluate how effective certain ads are in getting people to purchase products. We then use this information to identify which ads in the future will have greater purchase power.”

At 25, Siesser acquired his analytical wizardry through a highly specialized graduate program. The master’s degree in analytics blends the data modeling and statistical analysis expertise provided by the Stewart School of Industrial Systems & Engineering (ISyE) with the computational firepower of Georgia Tech’s College of Computing and the business analytics acumen from the Scheller College of Business.

While distinct, the program is actually one of several relatively new master’s degrees involving the College of Engineering that have a strong professional emphasis – two others being a master in supply chain engineering (SCE) and a master of biomedical innovation and development, or BioID. Together, the degrees demonstrate a remarkable level of agility from the nation’s largest engineering college, particularly in the ability to forge robust academic offerings that answer the fast-emerging needs of industry. 

To learn more about ISyE's M.S. of supply chain engineering, and why Atlanta -- and Georgia -- is uniquely positioned to play a leading role in U.S. supply chains -- as well as ISyE's interdisciplinary participation in the M.S. of Analytics program, read here: http://b.gatech.edu/29EXVWu.

Read the rest of the article here: http://b.gatech.edu/1W18Ag4.

The 2016 class brought together the most geographically diverse group of practitioners yet, from 20 different nationalities, who have lived and worked in 80 countries altogether, bringing extensive experience and insights from the global health and humanitarian sectors.

The course topics focused on logistics and supply-chain management related to a broad range of activities including preparing, responding to, and recovering from natural and man-made disasters, as well as ongoing humanitarian crises due to war, famine, infectious diseases, and chronic health problems.

Participants learned critical skills in disaster response planning and forecasting as well as tools for tactical decision making under uncertainty. Wendi McAfee, Program Coordinator for the Neglected Tropical Diseases Support Center at the Task Force for Global Health reflected: “The Systems Dynamics framework was incredibly well presented, and has given me not only a new career interest but also a tool with which to analyze and understand complex problems, including both the problems faced by humanitarian organizations and the problems they create.”

Likewise, Sanne Wijnhorst, Procurement Specialist for Oxfam Novib (Netherlands) reflected: “the course really enlightened me in many aspects of the humanitarian supply chain process. The forecasting and decision making tools will provide me with a lot of opportunities to optimize both processes and supply chains.” Rachel Gordon-Roberts, Logistics Coordinator, Emergency and Humanitarian Assistance from CARE USA also remarked on the relevance of the tools in helping her to “make use of inventory analysis, using more mathematical approach while planning and building strategies.”

The diversity of participants, both geographically and in terms of skills and experience in health and humanitarian operations across various sectors created a unique opportunity for new ways of “forming partnerships (formal or informal) for collaboration in the future,” as described by Dianne Lourenco, Monitoring and Evaluation Assistant at Village Reach in Mozambique.

Daniel Ngongo, Assistant Logistics Officer with the Management Science for Health(MSH/USAID) in DRC, also emphasized the value of an in-person format which allows for group cohesion and deeper knowledge sharing: “The diverse cohort provides examples and perspectives to support and complete the topics covered in lectures; conversations outside lectures during breaks and lunch were also a great way for us to learn from each other and absorb. Working in groups on class projects/games was a great way to learn as well.” Many others, including Matt Cohen-Price from Solaflect Energy, echoed this praise of the atmosphere of collaboration and future connection the course facilitates from participants’ shared experience: “Their experiences put the teachings into realistic perspective; they are smart, accomplished, dedicated friends whom I can call on or collaborate with in the future.”

Many of these participants rely on scholarships to attend professional education courses. The HHS Center is fortunate to provide a limited number of scholarships that are made available through the generosity of The UPS Foundation, Andrea L. Laliberte, Pete Quinones, and Richard E. and Charlene O. Zalesky. 2016 scholarship recipients represented organizations such as CARE (USA), Management Science for Health (MSH/USAID, Médecins sans Frontières (MSF Kenya), OXFAM DRC, Save the Children (Pakistan), in addition to United Nations agencies such as UNICEF (Ecuador), and the UN World Food Programme (WFP Nepal).

Other participants included representatives from national ministries of health in their countries, non-governmental organizations such as CDC (Ivory Coast), Chemonics, Emory University, LMI, Partners in Health (Lesotho), Solaflect Energy, UN Stabilization Mission in Haiti, UNHCR Sudan, the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), Village Reach (Mozambique and USA), and the World Health Organization (Sudan).

The certificate program consists of three courses: Pre-planning Strategy for Health and Humanitarian Organizations; Tactical Decision Making in Public Health and Humanitarian Response; Systems Operations in Health and Humanitarian Response. It is offered in a 6-day format (2 days per course), which enables individuals traveling from outside of Atlanta the opportunity to earn a certificate in less than a week. The blended delivery format includes pre-course reading assignments, in-class lectures, discussion, interactive games and group work.

For more information about the scholarships, please visit: http://hhls.scl.gatech.edu or to sponsor students for scholarships in 2016, please contact Meghan Smithgall at msmithgall@isye.gatech.edu.

For information about the courses, visit: https://hhscenter.gatech.edu/professional-education.

Here’s just one example: Every time you plug an address into a GPS app on your phone, you are creating data about where you plan to travel and when. These are two small pieces of a huge data set about commuting patterns that businesses can use to better understand driver behavior and potentially offer up desirable products and services along your route or improve your drive itself.

It takes trained data scientists to make sense of such complex information. It’s no wonder that the global demand for analytics gurus—usually part statistician, part computer programmer—has skyrocketed. The median salary for a data scientist is $116,870, and there are thousands of job openings in the U.S. alone, according to a 2016 report by Glassdoor.

Georgia Tech saw this educational demand coming: Two years ago, the Institute launched a one-year interdisciplinary Master of Science in Analytics program. What sets Tech’s program apart from other analytics degrees offered across the country, says its director Joel Sokol, is that it approaches analytics from three different perspectives: business, engineering and computing. In addition, the intense, one-year focus attracts those already working in industry who want to earn a formal, advanced degree in analytics—some of them even able to do so without interrupting their careers.

Read the rest of the story here: http://bit.ly/28KC2RM

Stewart School of Industrial & Systems Engineering (ISyE) Professor Julie Swann, Associate Professor Nicoleta Serban, and Ph.D. student Pravara Harati have analyzed six years of Medicaid claims for every child in ten U.S. states to compare the differences in cost for different types of patients based on their level of health and income. They found that healthy children are actually 50 to 60 percent of the total cost in the Medicaid system in Georgia, for example.

Read the rest of the article here: http://ipat.gatech.edu/georgia-tech-researchers-examine-medicaid-costs-children.

Both Zimmerman and Norris earned their undergraduate degrees at Georgia Tech. Zimmerman completed a double major in computer science and discrete mathematics with a minor in Russian. Norris completed a B.S. in economics and international affairs with a minor in computing and information internetworks.

 “Both Kyle and Sam are very smart, intellectually curious, high achievers who have broad interests, strong work ethics, and a wide range of technical and nontechnical abilities,” said program director Joel Sokol. “They're going to be excellent students at Georgia Tech, but more importantly, they're both on track to be outstanding analytics professionals and leaders.”

The fellowships are a one-year contribution by HPCC Systems, LexisNexis® Risk Solutions’ open-source, enterprise-proven platform for Big Data analysis and processing for large volumes of data in 24/7 environments.

They are awarded to two students with the intention of helping the M.S. in Analytics program attract top talent. In addition, the fellowships can create a talent pipeline: Zimmerman and Norris will be able to take an internship with HPCC Systems or even be potential post-graduation hires.

HPCC Systems is an open source solution for Big Data insights that can be implemented by businesses of all sizes. Born from LexisNexis Risk Solutions’ deep data analysis history, HPCC Systems helps businesses find the answers they’re looking for by making Big Data easier to process, analyze and understand. With HPCC Systems, developers can design applications with Big Data at their core, allowing businesses to better analyze and understand data at scale, improving business time to results and decisions.

In terms of the collaboration, Sokol adds, “We are delighted to partner with HPCC Systems for this first fellowship for the M.S. in Analytics program. It will strengthen Georgia Tech’s and HPCC Systems’ attractiveness for outstanding analytics professionals.”

“Individuals with the ability to identify patterns in vast data and extract facts, with a solid foundation in business, analytics and computer science, are in high demand in a modern world where nearly every industry has access to increasingly larger and more complex data than ever before,” said Flavio Villanustre, vice president, Technology, HPCC Systems. “We chose to be involved with Georgia Tech’s M.S. in Analytics program because high-quality education is paramount to develop talent for the decades to come, and give individuals every opportunity to succeed.”

Until recently, there has not been a tool that helps would-be ED users – specifically those who do not arrive via ambulance – determine which nearby hospital has the shortest wait time. Thanks to an interdisciplinary undergraduate team of students from Georgia Tech, the web-based application FindED.io does just that.

When a user goes to the FindED website, she sees a search bar based on the user enabling location services, or else she can enter her location manually. She is then taken to a screen that displays hospitals within a 15-mile radius of her location. Each hospital shows the wait time (based on an annually reported average), the travel time based on real-time information from Google Maps, a quality index average, and – for the state of Georgia – the major insurance providers accepted.

Prashant Tailor (IE 2016), a newly graduated alumnus in the Stewart School of Industrial & Systems Engineering (ISyE) and a member of the FindED team, served for several years as an undergraduate researcher for ISyE professor Eva Lee. (Lee is also Director for the NSF-Whitaker Center for Operations Research in Medicine and Healthcare, Co-Director for the NSF-I/UCRC Center for Health Organization Transformation, and Distinguished Scholar in Health Systems, Health System Institute, Emory University and Georgia Tech.) It was through his research with Lee in support of her research that Tailor came up with the initial idea for FindED.

“I was working at Grady and other hospitals,” Tailor explains, “and I noticed that there was an excessively long wait, especially at Grady. I thought, ‘I can look up wait times for other things online – like food – why can I not do this for a hospital?’”

Tailor emphasizes the importance of the team’s interdisciplinary nature as integral to the success of putting FindED together. In addition to Tailor, the co-founders include Farhan Khan (CS 2016), Dale Rivera (CS 2016), and Tony Shu (MSE & CS 2017). The group knows each other well; the latter three have been friends since high school, and Tailor met them through a mutual friend when they all arrived at Tech together.

“We wanted to leverage the technical skill sets we have to make something people can really use,” he notes. “I would say that it was almost essential to work with an interdisciplinary team, as [FindED] is a very technical product.”

Shu, who is earning a dual degree in MSE and computer science, describes his own experience with FindED: “Working on my first real web design project was intimidating, especially considering how my background up until that point was all in materials. My primary contributions were to the front end of the website. Learning web design from scratch kept me busy for weeks. My biggest takeaway from this project is an understanding of how websites are built and shared.”

Tailor adds, “Working with an MSE, it was good to have a different perspective on the project – how he would approach something versus how I would approach something versus how the two computer science majors would approach something. One [of us] was more design-oriented, so he was always focused on the user experience, and another was focused on making the [site load] as fast as possible. [So the question] was how can we balance these two things?”

For Tailor, it was to look at the big picture. “The IE aspect to me is how can I look at the entire system? How do I use a data set to model a real-life system? That’s pure ISyE.”

He adds, “From the start, I came to Georgia Tech and wanted to get into the complex intersection of ISyE and health care, and Professor Lee has been instrumental in showing me that this area is huge. IE can help improve patient care, patient quality, and delivering health care.”

The team’s hard work paid off with some considerable attention. They put the site up on Reddit one night: “We put it on Reddit just to see what [would] happen,” Tailor says, laughing. “We expected a couple of people to look at it, but then it ended up on the front page. It was very exciting. ” FindED went viral. In the end, the application was beta-tested by over 50,000 Reddit users in a 48-hour period.

In addition, the team took the paper based on their project to a first-place win in the technical paper competition at the 2016 IIE Southeast Regional Conference. Shu presented the paper at the University of South Florida in Tampa. The entire team will travel to Disneyland in Anaheim, CA to present the paper in the Undergraduate Technical Paper Competition Global Finals at the IISE Annual Conference & Expo in late May.

Advisor Eva Lee confirms the significance of the team’s win: “It's an honor for the team to have won this regional competition. The composition of the team showcases the interdisciplinary nature of the work. The key challenges are to ensure that the app is relevant, the information provided is objective and up-to-date, and that patients can choose what matters them the most – how long they have to wait versus quality ranking, or insurance acceptance, etc.

“We have already beta-tested its usability to over 60,000 users. The win definitely motivates broader dissemination.”

Right now, the team is focused on polishing and improving their paper for the global competition. As far as the future for FindED goes, Lee says, “There are other features that I would like the team to investigate; we will continue to improve it as more feedback is received from the provider and consumer ends.”

However, the application was not created with entrepreneurship and profit-generation in mind, according to Tailor. “At its core, it was how we can help people and how we can learn something new.”

 WIE Scholarship Recipients and Sponsoring Agency

Navila Akther, sophomore, Alcoa

Jasmine Atkinson, senior, George Family Foundation

Ingraid Cai, sophomore, Boeing

Hannah Chen, sophomore, Kimberly-Clark

Rachel Conlee, sophomore, John Deere

Anika Dhamodharan, senior, Jane Ammons

Emma Heaslet, junior, Geneva Cooper

Jacqueline Krevolin, senior, Norfolk Southern

Stacey Nduati, senior, GM

Ije Okafor, junior, Georgia Power

Marie Ozenua, freshman, GM

Erica Qin, freshman, Geneva Cooper

Neha Saxena, senior, Michelin

Elizabeth Swiger, junior, Boeing

Charu Thomas, junior, Boeing

Natalia Troncoso, junior, Michelin

About the Women in Engineering Program

WIE is dedicated to recruiting top female students into engineering majors and, once enrolled, to ensure the highest level of retention by fostering an environment that encourages curiosity, creativity and intellectual and personal growth. WIE strives to redefine the engineering profession as a positive societal force with the potential to improve the quality of life through the creation of world changing technologies.

Sebastian Pokutta has been appointed David M. McKenney Family Assistant Professor, as announced by Georgia Tech’s Stewart School of Industrial & Systems Engineering (ISyE), effective March 15, 2016.

“Sebastian was selected for this professorship because of his exceptional record of scholarship and leadership in the areas of optimization, big data analytics, and machine learning,” said ISyE School Chair and Professor Edwin Romeijn.

Pokutta, who is also the director of the Interactive Optimization and Learning Lab, has research concentrations on combinatorial optimization and polyhedral combinatorics, and in particular focuses on cutting-plane methods and extended formulations. His industry research interests are in optimization and machine learning in the context of analytics with a focus on real-world applications, both in established industries as well as in emerging technologies. Application areas include but are not limited to supply chain management, finance, cyber-physical systems, and predictive analytics. To date, Pokutta has successfully deployed analytics methodology in 20-plus real-world projects.

Subsequent to his graduate studies, Pokutta worked as a postdoctoral fellow at the MIT Operations Research Center where the topic of his research was combinatorial optimization and cutting plane procedures. Upon completion of his postdoctoral fellowship at MIT, Pokutta was appointed as an optimization specialist at ILOG where he worked on production planning and supply chain optimization within the steel industry, automotive industry, and energy industry. In early 2008, he joined KDB Krall Demmel Baumgarten in order to set up a quantitative, state-of-the art risk management practice and develop risk management methodologies at top tier banks. He then returned to academia and held the position of a research scientist at the Technische Universität Darmstadt and was visiting lecturer at MIT. Prior to joining Georgia Tech, Pokutta worked as a professor at the University of Erlangen-Nürnberg.

Pokutta received his master's degree in 2003 and his Ph.D. in 2005 in mathematics, both from the University of Duisburg-Essen in Germany.

“ISyE has a very large impact on society, both locally and around the world, through our Senior Design program,” said Leon McGinnis, Senior Design coordinator. “We can be very proud of our students.”

The 28 teams presented their projects at the spring 2016 Capstone Expo on April 26, 2016. Out of this group, three teams — Interface Prod, reFUEL, and UPS Air Opt —were chosen as finalists to compete in the Best of Senior Design on May 4. Team Interface Prod was selected as the first-place winner.

The Interface Prod team developed a sales and operations planning system for Interface, Inc., the world's largest modular carpet tile manufacturer. The software-based system takes in sales history for demand forecasting and production planning. With customizable inputs, the system generates potential production scenarios to run through a simulator of the entire production process. The simulator outputs production time and cost information on a station-level for each production run. This allows Interface to analyze results, compare trade-offs, and make continuous improvements. With the team’s recommendations, the system predicts production savings of $2.2 million for the first quarter of 2016.

Interface plans to implement the project by the end of the third quarter in 2016. It will build the foundation of a sales and operations planning team, which Interface did not have prior to the Senior Design project.

“The Interface team is proud to have worked with the Georgia Tech ISyE Senior Design team. Their work to develop a sales & operations planning system gives us the ability to quickly evaluate various production and inventory strategies given a certain demand scenario. This system gives us the scenario-planning tool we need to continuously adapt our strategy to changes in the marketplace,”
said Chris Turk, senior vice president for manufacturing and operations at Interface.

Team members included Yaodong Jia, Lisa Liu, Alexandria Schmid, Antong Su, Kattelie Thys, Ziyu (Tino) Zhang, and Jingyu Zhu. They were advised by Professor Alexander Shapiro.

Team reFUEL developed a random forest classification model using machine learning to detect and prevent fraud for FLEETCOR. The company is a leading independent global provider of specialized payment products and services including fleet cards, food cards, corporate lodging discount cards, and other specialized payment services for businesses throughout the world. FLEETCOR, which is liable for all fraudulent transactions on their cards, can use this model to save upwards of $5 million in fraud payouts each year.

Team members included Saharsh Chordia, Andree Curran, Matthew Faenza, Mary Elizabeth Herndon, Kyung Kim, Haeun Park, Julia Wayne, and Haidan Zhou. They were advised by David M. McKenney Family Assistant Professor Sebastian Pokutta.

Team UPS Air Opt has enabled UPS International Air Freight to take full advantage of package consolidation for international shipments by redesigning their routing decision process. This was accomplished through the development of an optimization-based tool that effectively combines dense and volumetric cargo on flights. 

For 15 percent of the system, UPS will see an immediate estimated annual savings of $3.5 million by using the suggested guidelines. Going forward, the team proposed an alternative routing paradigm that could see an annual savings of $5.9 million. 

UPS has already begun to implement the project by using the optimization tool in the UPS International Air Freight business unit. After the tool has been fully vetted using sample data, the optimization tool will be implemented as a stable analytical tool that complements the business unit’s existing toolkit of evaluation software/methods, according to Jack McPherson of UPS Corporate Transportation.

Team members include Abubaker Abubaker, James Alcock, Peter Alcock, Cristian Barron, Emily Dong, Nicole Gottret Murillo, Eduardo Prieto, and Sebastian Salazar. They were advised by Virginia C. and Joseph C. Mello Chair and Professor Paul Griffin.

During the 2016 Capstone Expo, a panel of alumni judges chose Senior Design team Second Self as the ISyE winner. This team worked with local microbrewery Second Self (founded by two Georgia Tech alumni) to implement a project that will enable the brewery's scalable growth, from a local to a regional brewery.

Second Self team members include John Cho, Brian Homans, Yikyung Kim, Gloria Lozano, John Na, Charles Oliva, Sue Pedapudi, and Matthew Zerkus. They were advised by Coca-Cola Material Handling & Distribution Chair and Professor Benoit Montreuil.

The director of GT-AE’s Air Transportation Lab (ATL), Clarke traveled to Detroit last month to formally receive the honor during SAE’s World Congress.

The Society honored Clarke for his work as the principal investigator on a research team included colleagues from Delta Air Lines and the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA).  Under Clarke's direction, the team developed the RIIVR Optimized Profile Decent (OPD) Arrival procedure at Los Angeles International Airport. Implemented in 2007, the procedure has reduced the fuel consumed by arrivals at LAX by an estimated 2 million gallons annually.

“In addition to reducing the amount of fuel consumed, CO2 and NOx emissions are also reduced – environmental considerations that are hindering the growth of aviation,” said Clarke.

The OPD procedure, pioneered by Clarke, minimizes noise, gaseous emissions, fuel consumption, and flight time while simultaneously maintaining or in some cases increasing landing efficiency via the accurate modeling of the vehicle’s performance when there are uncertainties with respect to aircraft weight, pilot performance, and turbulence.

“Instead of allowing aircraft to begin their descent and then periodically stopping their descent so that air traffic controllers can correct for the effects of uncertainties, we model the effects of these uncertainties ahead of time and compensate for them in a strategic manner through optimal spacing prior to the start of the descent, thereby allowing the aircraft descend continuously at or near idle thrust,” said Clarke.

Also honored by SAE  at the World Congress were Grady Boyce (technical pilot at Delta Air Lines); Sandy Liu (engineer in the FAA Office of Environment and Energy); Walter White (formerly the airspace manager in the FAA Southern California TRACON and now the CEO of PBN4ATC, Inc.); Jim Brooks (senior research scientist in GT ATL); Gaurav Nagle (formerly a graduate student in GT ATL and now a systems engineer at Lockheed Martin); Liling Ren (formerly a research engineer in GT ATL and now a principal scientist at the GE Global Research Center); and Annalisa Scacchioli (formerly a post-doc in the  ATL and now an assistant professor at the Stevens Institute of Technology).

In addition to LAX, the OPD procedure has been adopted at several other busy airports, including Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport (ATL), Anchorage International Airport (ANC), and Honolulu International Airport (HNL). The FAA estimates this has shaved $21.7 million off the annual fuel costs for these four airports, and “if you extrapolate those figures to the top 35 airports, we could see a savings of $112 million per year in fuel costs.”

In this interview, Mak extensively discusses his research interests and activities as an ISyE student.

Why did you select Georgia Tech and ISyE for your Ph.D. work?

After completing my undergraduate studies in statistics and professional actuarial exams, I worked as an actuary for a period of time. I eventually returned to pursue a doctorate degree, since research opportunities appealed to me much more than the problems encountered in the industry. The ISyE department at Georgia Tech, as one of the leaders in statistics and operations research, presents the ideal avenue for my goals, and I am very fortunate to be studying under the world-class faculty here.

From a high-level perspective, what are your research interests?

My research can be grouped into two categories: experimental design and emulation of computer experiments.

The first category, experimental design, is a systematic way to the relationship between input and output variables in a process by conducting experiments. At a high level, my research involves optimally assign experimental runs over different input combinations so that the maximum information can be extracted on the input-output process.

The second category, emulation of computer experiments, uses statistical tools to predict outputs from computationally expensive computer simulations. Given recent advancements in high-performance computing over the last decade, many engineering experiments can now be simulated on computer desktops and clusters. However, these simulations can still be computationally expensive, and may take weeks or months to complete. To this end, a major part of my research involves using statistical methods to predict these simulations at new settings, using a database of existing simulations.

You have received many awards and scholarships throughout the course of your academic studies. What was particularly meaningful about receiving NSERC’s PGS D scholarship?

Unlike previous awards and scholarships, the PGS D scholarship provides the financial means necessary for me to continue pursuing my goals and aspirations in research.

You are working in conjunction with the School of Aerospace Engineering on the emulation of rocket injector simulations. Describe this project and what you hope to accomplish with your work on it.

This project is a joint collaboration between ISyE and Aerospace Engineering at Georgia Tech to develop next-generation rocket engines. As mentioned previously, computer simulations are employed to study sources of combustion instabilities for these engines, but may take months to complete for one engine design.

Our work is two-fold as statisticians. First, using a database of existing simulations, an emulator is constructed which can predict flow evolution at a new engine design in a matter of minutes. Second, using this emulator, optimal design settings can be obtained which minimize instabilities in the combustion process. The goal for this project is to combine state-of-the-art emulation tools with high-fidelity simulations to create a new and powerful methodology for rocket engine design.

What do you like to do in your free time?

Research! Just joking. In my free time, I enjoy playing piano, reading, and volunteering.

What does the future look like for you?

After graduation, I am looking to pursue a career in research, hopefully in academia.

During her time at Georgia Tech, Poulos also had a passion for volunteering for the nonprofit organization, Wish for WASH. The nonprofit was started by Jasmine Burton, a fellow Georgia Tech graduate, who won the 2014 Georgia Tech Inventure Prize Competition for the SafiChoo mobile toilet. (“SafiChoo” means “clean toilet” in Kiswahili.) Wish for WASH “develops user-friendly toilet systems that are also cost-effective” for developing countries.

In this interview, which took place prior to Poulos’ graduation, she discusses – among other topics – her work for Wish for WASH, and how her ISyE training helped her improve the nonprofit’s business development.

You’re about to graduate. Why did you select Georgia Tech for your college experience, and ISyE as your major?

I decided to come to Georgia Tech because I really wanted to do engineering. Being an in-state student, Georgia Tech was a really great option, and it gave me so many opportunities, such as studying abroad and internships. I chose ISyE because I thought it would be a great way to gain exposure to engineering but still have a wide variety of options for internships and future career opportunities. The opportunity to study abroad in Beijing and Singapore with ISyE was also a major selling point.

You have considerable internship experience with financial analysis, and you’ll be pursuing a career in this field after graduation. What interests you most about this area?

My interest in the stock market has really fueled my general interest in finance. I love trading stocks, which I have done since I was quite young. In fact, I bought my first shares of a mutual fund when I was nine years old.

What are you looking forward to most about your new job in NYC with UBS Investment Bank as an equity derivatives analyst?

I love the pace of the market. The stock market is really a compilation of world events, and there is a living, breathing art behind it that I find thrilling. Every day on the UBS trading floor during my internship last summer was a unique experience. I love that I can walk into work where things can change at a moment’s notice. More specifically, I enjoy equity derivatives because they provide a very technical way to express opinions on the market. I feel incredibly grateful to have gotten the opportunity to work full-time doing something I love.

Other than Wish for WASH, of all your extracurricular activities, which has been the most significant for you, and why?

My time spent on Freshman Council was the most significant for my college career aside from Wish for WASH. The opportunity to be a part of that organization was really important for me, because it helped me to see that there is more to life than just schoolwork. Freshman Council really helped me to embrace equally important aspects in college: finding passions in life and forming lifelong friendships. I was fortunate enough to be an advisor for another council after my own experience.

Please briefly explain Wish for WASH’s mission.

Wish for WASH aims to develop user-friendly toilet systems that are also cost-effective. Wish for WASH really seeks to help better the human condition through improved sanitation for the 2.5 billion people who do not have access to adequate sanitation around the world. These sanitation issues disproportionally affect women, so part of improving sanitary conditions will be to improve the lives of women around the world.

What is your role at Wish for WASH?

I work primarily on business development for Wish for WASH – I am working to help find a sustainable business solution as Wish for WASH hopes to expand. It’s a very challenging project, as there are very limited resources and specific cultural norms, aid availability, and established systems unique to each potential market. There is no “one size fits all” solution to improve the sanitation needs for 2.5 billion people all over the world when no two situations or markets are the same. If it were easy, it would have been done already!

Describe your trip to Zambia with Wish for WASH: Why was it important for you to go, and what did you do while there?

During my trip to Zambia, I assisted with the first phase of the beta test of the latest SafiChoo toilet design in a peri-urban community in Lusaka. During my time there, the Wish for WASH team oversaw the retrofitting/cleaning of the current pit as well as the construction and installation of the SafiChoo toilet. We met with various stakeholders including toilet users, engineers, construction workers, and local fecal collection agencies to discuss possible further implementation of the toilet. We really aimed to gain information on the feasibility of implementing this system on a larger scale.

In Zambia, I was mostly interested in learning as much as possible regarding the availability of funding and the market in order to find the best way to create a sustainable business model. Until I went to Zambia, I did not fully understand the difficulty in implementing a revolutionary toilet design halfway across the world, in a community with few resources and established systems and cultural norms that are so different from ours here in the U.S. It was an incredibly worthwhile time.

Aside from working, we also went on safaris, were able to pet rhinos and cheetahs, and visited local markets. All in all, it made for a very exciting trip!

How is Wish for WASH piloting the latest SafiChoo toilet design in Zambia?

As mentioned earlier, Wish for WASH is working with a local community in Lusaka, Zambia. The organization is aiming to see how well the SafiChoo system meets user preferences and needs, test the feasibility of manufacturing and implementation, and evaluate the scalability of our system in this and other markets. We are testing the design for usability while also evaluation potential future costs, revenue streams, and production methodologies.

Again, this is largely a test of both the design feasibility and usability, and a test to see how the toilet performs in the marketplace, as well as gauging how expensive and feasible it would be to implement this on a larger scale in this community (and others and in different contexts elsewhere).

What does your IE background enable you to do for the organization that you might not otherwise be able to do?

My ISyE knowledge and background has helped me to approach this problem from a very practical, straightforward approach. While I may not be able to contribute as much to the design of the toilet, I am able to help Wish for WASH develop a sustainable business model and evaluate how to practically grow Wish for Wash as a business. I prefer to look at the problem from more of a logistics and business perspective.

Also, given my finance background, I am interested in determining how to get funding continuously so that this is not a one-time charity donation but rather a means of helping people help themselves. All perspectives are valuable and in the context of such a complex problem, making an interdisciplinary approach necessary. My particular ISyE background gives me a unique and valuable perspective in terms of developing a practical, scalable solution to an enormous global sanitation problem.

ISyE faculty continue to win prominent awards and recognition. Here are highlights from the past couple of semesters.

INFORMS Fellows

Pinar Keskinocak, ISyE William W. George Chair and ADVANCE Professor, has been elected an INFORMS Fellow as part of the 2015 class. She is the co-founder and co-director of the Center for Health & Humanitarian Systems at Georgia Tech.

Eva Lee, ISyE Professor, was also elected a 2015 INFORMS Fellow. Lee directs the Center for Operations Research in Medicine and HealthCare. She is a Distinguished Scholar in Health Systems at the Health Systems Institute of Emory University School of Medicine and Georgia Tech.

INFORMS Fellows are examples of outstanding lifetime achievement in operations research and the management sciences. They have demonstrated exceptional accomplishments and made significant contributions to the advancement of OR/MS over a period of time. Their service to the profession and to INFORMS has culminated in election to the INFORMS Fellow Award.

IEEE Fellow

Spyros Reveliotis, Professor, has been elected a Fellow to the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. He has research interests in discrete event systems theory and its applications, especially in the control of flexibly automated production and workflow management systems.

AIAA Fellow

John-Paul Clarke, Professor in Georgia Tech’s Daniel Guggenheim School of Aerospace Engineering with a courtesy appointment in ISyE, has been elected as a Fellow in the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA). His research and teaching in the areas of control, optimization, and system analysis and design are motivated by his desire to simultaneously maximize the efficiency and minimize the societal impact (especially on the environment) of the global air transportation system. He has made seminal contributions in the areas of air traffic management, aircraft operations, and airline operations.

Awards

Pinar Keskinocak, William W. George Chair and ADVANCE Professor, and Julie Swann, Harold R. and Mary Anne Nash Professor, have been honored with George Tech’s 2016 Steven A. Denning Award for Global Engagement. The Steven A. Denning Award for Global Engagement recognizes a Georgia Tech faculty member who has demonstrated sustained outstanding achievement and commitment to the advancement of the Georgia Institute of Technology’s global engagement.

Benoit Montreuil, Coca-Cola Material Handling & Distribution Chair and Professor, has been selected to receive the 2015 Pythagore Award from his alma mater, the Université du Québec à Trois-Rivières. The award recognizes the exceptional accomplishments of an alumnus, including professional achievements, peer recognition, community engagement, and a strong relationship with UQTR. The award is “the equivalent of a gold medal,” which the recipients receive for offering out-of-the-ordinary education, application of their work, and their achievements.

Jan Shi, Carolyn J. Stewart Chair and Professor, has been awarded the Institute of Industrial and System Engineers (IISE) David F. Baker Distinguished Research Award. The award is given to a single awardee each year in recognition of a career of accomplishments that has broadly benefited practitioners, organizations, or other researchers.

Robin Thomas, Professor of Mathematics, Regents' Professor, and Courtesy Appointment in ISyE, was named the Georgia Tech Class of 1934 Distinguished Professor. The Class of 1934 Distinguished Professor Award recognizes outstanding achievement in teaching, research, and service and is Georgia Tech’s highest faculty honor.

Alejandro Toriello, Assistant Professor, has received a five-year, $500,000 CAREER grant from the NSF. Selection for this award is based on two important criteria: 1) innovative research at the frontiers of science and technology that is relevant to the mission of NSF, and 2) community service demonstrated through scientific leadership, education, or community outreach.

Paper Awards

Linkan Bian, now Assistant Professor at Mississippi State University, has been awarded the Best Paper in the IIE Transactions Focus Issue on Quality and Reliability Engineering for 2016. His winning paper is "Degradation Modeling for Real-Time Estimation of Residual Lifetimes in Dynamic Environments.” He was advised by Georgia Power Associate Professor Nagi Gebraeel.

Eva Lee, ISyE Professor, and her team of collaborators from Emory University and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have been awarded the INFORMS Daniel H. Wagner award for "Machine Learning for Predicting Vaccine Immunity.” The prize emphasizes the quality and coherence of the analysis used in practice and recognizes those principles by emphasizing good writing, strong analytical content, and verifiable practice successes.

Matthew Plumlee, now Assistant Professor at the University of Michigan (advised by Roshan Vengazhiyil, ISyE Professor, and Jianjun Shi, ISyE Carolyn J. Stewart Chair and Professor), was awarded the Best Dissertation Award for 2016 by Georgia Tech’s chapter of Sigma Xi, the Scientific Research Society.

Spyros Reveliotis, Professor, and Ahmed Nazeem (MSIE 2009, Ph.D. IE 2012), shared the 2014 T-ASE Best Paper Award. The award-winning paper is entitled “Efficient Enumeration of Minimal Unsafe States in Complex Resource Allocation Systems.” “T-ASE” stands for Transactions on Automation Science and Engineering and is one of the flagship journals of the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society.

Valerie Thomas, Anderson Interface Professor of Natural Systems, along with her collaborators, have had their paper selected as the best operations management paper in the INFORMS journal Management Science. Their paper is entitled “Is Leasing Greener Than Selling?”

Linwei Xin, now Assistant Professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, received the 2015 INFORMS George E. Nicholson Student Paper Award. The award-winning paper was entitled “Asymptotic Optimality of Tailored Base-surge Policies in Dual-sourcing Inventory Systems," co-authored with ISyE Assistant Professor David A. Goldberg.

Georgia Tech’s Stewart School of Industrial & Systems Engineering (ISyE) has hired new faculty in the last two semester. ISyE has also made several new faculty appointments, thanks to generous endowments from our alumni, as well as the College of Engineering.

New Hires

George Lan joined ISyE in January 2016 as an Associate Professor. His research interests are in theory, algorithms, and applications of stochastic optimization and nonlinear programming. Most of his current work concerns the design of efficient algorithms with strong theoretical performance guarantees and superior practical performance for solving challenging optimization problem

Moe Trebuchon joined ISyE in August 2015 asEdenfield Executive-in-Residence. He is considered a subject matter leader in the application of Demand Forecasting, Replenishment, WMS, TMS, Order Management and Omni-Channel technology to the order fulfillment and delivery process having led a broad base of clients through complex technology enabled change programs.

Appointments

Turgay Ayer was appointed the George Family Foundation Assistant Professor of Predictive Health in April 2016. He is also the research director for medical decision-making in the Center for Health & Humanitarian Systems at Georgia Tech. Dr. Ayer conducts research on stochastic modeling and optimization, with applications in predictive health, medical decision making, health care operations, and health policy.

David Goldberg was appointed A. Russell Chandler III Assistant Professor in February 2016. Dr. Goldberg works in applied probability, interpreted broadly, on topics ranging from inventory control and queueing theory to distributionally robust and combinatorial optimization. Much of his work focuses on using ideas from probability theory to prove that high-dimensional complex systems can be well-approximated by much simpler systems, and using these insights to devise novel algorithms with provable performance guarantees.

Sebastian Pokutta was appointed David M. McKenney Family Assistant Professor in April 2016. Dr. Pokutta's research concentrates on combinatorial optimization and polyhedral combinatorics, and in particular focuses on cutting-plane methods and extended formulations. His industry research interests are in optimization and machine learning in the context of analytics with a focus on real-world applications, both in established industries as well as in emerging technologies. Application areas include but are not limited to supply chain management, finance, cyber-physical systems, and predictive analytics.

Enlu Zhou was appointed Fouts Family Assistant Professor in May 2016. Her research interests include simulation optimization, stochastic control, and Monte Carlo methods, with applications in financial engineering and revenue management.

Nagi Gebraeel was named to a five-year appointment as Georgia Power Associate Professor in the College of Engineering in January 2016. Dr. Gebraeel currently serves as an associate director at Georgia Tech's Strategic Energy Institute with the responsibility of identifying and promoting research activities and thought leadership at the intersection of data science and energy. From the standpoint of application domains, he has a general interest in the energy industry with a focus on power generation, and the manufacturing industry with a focus on discrete and continuous manufacturing.

ISyE’s undergraduate and graduate students continue to earn numerous awards and honors. Here are a few highlights from the past two semesters.

Undergraduate Awards

Harshil Goel, a third-year, was awarded the John L. Imhoff Globalization Scholarship from Alpha Pi Mu, the national industrial engineering honor society. The award is given to a student who has demonstrated globalization activities, cooperation, and understanding through leadership and related initiatives.

Kiran Rampersad, a junior, was awarded the Southeastern Writing Center Association (SWCA) Undergraduate Peer Tutor of the Year. This is the first time the award has gone to a Georgia Tech student and recognizes leadership, commitment, and overall excellence of individuals working in an SWCA writing center.

Prashant Tailor, a graduating senior, was part of an interdisciplinary team who won first place in the technical paper competition at the IIE Southeast Regional Conference. Their award-winning paper is titled "FindED.io - A Patient Decision Tool for Determining the Optimal Emergency Room for Non-Ambulance Emergencies." The team developed a web application that compares hospital ERs by wait time, quality, and travel time. 

Graduate Awards

Pravara Harati was the recipient of a 2016 NSF Graduate Research Fellowship. The NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program recognizes and supports outstanding graduate students in NSF-supported STEM disciplines who are pursuing research-based master's and doctoral degrees at accredited United States institutions.

Amelia Musselman was awarded the $10,000 Global Impact Award from the Achievement Rewards for Academic Scientists (ARCS). ARCS awardees have been selected by their respective schools for meeting and maintaining the high standards of academic excellence required by ARCS Foundation.

Kevin Ryan was awarded $7,500 from the Achievement Rewards for Academic Scientists program (ARCS). ARCS awardees have been selected by their respective schools for meeting and maintaining the high standards of academic excellence required by ARCS Foundation.

Team O-Mazing, consisting of students in Georgia Tech's interdisciplinary M.S. of Analytics program, won the Krannert Walmart Data Dive Competition. Teams of graduate and undergraduate students from around the country used Walmart trend data and were tasked with developing solutions in two areas—customer segmentation and predicting products for efficient shelf space usage in a 24-hour competition.

Hao Yan, along with Assistant Professor Kamran Paynabar and Carolyn J. Stewart Chair and Professor Jianjun (Jan) Shi, won the Quality, Statistics and Reliability Refereed Track Best Paper Competition at INFORMS. Their paper is entitled “Real-time Monitoring and Diagnosis of High-Dimensional Data Streams via Spatio-Temporal Smooth Sparse Decomposition.”

Chenxi Zeng won the 2015 Doing Good with Good OR Award at INFORMS, which identifies and honors outstanding projects in the field of operations research and the management sciences conducted by a student or student group that have a significant societal impact. Zeng also received the Georgia Tech Research and Innovation Conference (GTRIC) fellowship for his dissertation. GTRIC convenes hundreds of graduate students annually to present their research to the Georgia Tech community. The event gives graduate students the opportunity to compete for monetary prizes for their research, in order to fund continued research.

Ran Li and Professor Spyros Reveliotis and their poster, “Optimized Scheduling of Sequential Resource Allocation Systems,” placed as finalists in the Poster Competition at INFORMS.

Matias Siebert Sandoval was part of a team selected as a finalist for the INFORMS Franz Edelman Award. The purpose of the Franz Edelman competition is to bring forward, recognize and reward outstanding examples of operations research, management science and advanced analytics in practice in the world,

Murat Yildirim's paper, "Sensor Driven Condition Based Generation Maintenance and Operations Scheduling" was selected as a finalist for the INFORMS 2015 Data Mining Best Student Paper Award. The award is given to the best paper on any topic related to data mining by a student author.

Can Zhang was a finalist for the INFORMS 2015 George E. Nicholson Student Paper Award with “2-Approximation Policies for Fixed-lifetime Perishable Inventory Control.” The George Nicholson Committee competition is held each year to identify and honor outstanding papers in the field of operations research and the management sciences written by a student.

Read the rest of her story here: http://bit.ly/1NkZ6KG.

But in one way, he is very different from his peers: Benatar is 86 years old.

“My kids joke that I’ll have to update my resume this weekend for my next job interview,” said Benatar.    

Benatar will earn his Master's of Science in Industrial Engineering degree Friday night, 59 years after he was ready to receive it.

Benatar graduated from Georgia Tech with his bachelor’s degree — also in industrial engineering — in 1951 during a ceremony on Grant Field. After a stint with the Navy, he returned to campus in 1954 and began working on his master’s during night classes. Six months shy of graduation in 1957, while preparing for his thesis defense, his advisor left the Institute and Georgia Tech couldn’t find anyone knowledgeable enough about the topic to effectively hear the defense. Commencement came and went and Benatar continued taking classes. A replacement wasn’t found the next year either. Eventually, the Atlanta native decided to begin his career and leave campus without the degree.

A few years later, Georgia Tech dropped the thesis requirement, allowing students to graduate if they had taken enough courses. Benatar had, so he followed up with John White, the director of the School of Industrial Engineering at the time, to ask about finally getting his degree. But White left shortly afterwards and the request fell through the cracks.

Benatar made some inquiries every so often during the last few decades, but wheels started to move in the right direction when he mentioned it last summer to Edwin Romeijn, the current chair of the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial & Systems Engineering. In December he got the word that he was officially a member of the Class of 2016.

“Psychologically it’s a tremendous feeling for me,” Benatar said. “I’d done the work and gone to the classes, but didn’t get the fulfillment of the degree. I’m the type of person who wants to complete everything that I start. That’s what I’ve done in business — it’s what Tech taught me.”

Among a long list of career accomplishments, Benatar served as the director, president, CEO and chairman of the board of Engraph Inc., a $500 million manufacturing company at the time of his retirement in 1996. He’s a former chairman of The Federal Reserve (Sixth District, Atlanta). He’s also the principal of Benatar & Associates and serves on the board of Aaron’s Inc.

“Georgia Tech was a great learning experience,” he said. “It prepared me for business by forcing me to think through possibilities and work really hard to determine solutions. To be frank with you, I couldn’t get into Georgia Tech Tech today. The quality of the students that we’re attracting is mind-boggling.”

Benatar and his wife, Louise, are members of The Hill Society (Georgia Tech’s most prestigious giving society) and established the Leo and Louise Benatar Endowment for the Stewart School of Industrial & Systems Engineering. The east entrance of McCamish Pavilion, the site of this weekend’s ceremonies, is named after the couple. Seventeen members of his family and friends will attend.

“Completing this gives me a tremendous sense of satisfaction,” he said. “Far more than the worth of the degree. It will be fun — it’s not often that you’re older than the president who will give you the degree.”

“Enlu was selected for this professorship because of her exceptional record of scholarship and leadership in the areas of simulation optimization and stochastic control,” said ISyE School Chair and Professor Edwin Romeijn.

Zhou’s research interests include simulation optimization, stochastic control, and Monte Carlo methods, with applications in financial engineering and revenue management.

Prior to Georgia Tech, Zhou served as an assistant professor at the Industrial & Enterprise Systems Engineering Department at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign from 2009 to 2013. She received her Ph.D. in electrical engineering from the University of Maryland, College Park, in 2009.

But children’s health issues remain front and center for a dedicated group Petit Undergraduate Research Scholars, thanks to the support of Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta (Children’s), which is working to improve the future of care for its young clientele. 

Children’s is supporting six Petit Scholars through its Children’s Scholars Program this year, an initiative that is part of the Children’s Pediatric Technology Center (a collaboration that includes Emory University and Georgia Tech). These students are addressing a range of issues that include cystic fibrosis, neuromuscular disease, cancer, and the economics of depression.

The Petit Scholars include ISyE students Sean Monahan and Alex Moran. Click here to read more about their work: http://petitinstitute.gatech.edu/children%E2%80%99s-investing-future.

Two ISyE students, Titilayo Funso and Kexin Zhang, received Institute awards.

For the full story, click here: http://coe.gatech.edu/news/engineering-majors-win-big-student-honors-celebration.

Graduate Awards

Alice and John Jarvis, Ph.D. Student Research Award

Winners: Burak Kocuk and Weijun Xie

Honorable Mention: Shuang Li and Alvaro Lorca Galvez

Award presented by: Dr. Edwin Romeijn, H. Milton and Carolyn J. Stewart School Chair and Professor

ISyE Outstanding Graduate Student Instructor Award

Anthony Bonifonte

Award presented by: Dr. Alan Erera, Associate Chair for Graduate Studies and ISyE Professor

ISyE Outstanding Graduate Student Teaching Assistant Award

Weijun Ding

Award presented by: Dr. Arkadi Nemirovski, ISyE Professor

Undergraduate Awards

Institute of Industrial Engineers Excellence in Leadership Award

Andree Curran

Award presented by: Dr. Edwin Romeijn, H. Milton and Carolyn J. Stewart School Chair and Professor

ISyE Alpha Pi Mu Academic Excellence Award

Martin Restrepo

Award presented by: Dr. Natashia Boland, ISyE Professor

Evelyn Pennington Outstanding Service Award

David Wang

Award presented by: Dr. Chen Zhou, Associate Chair for Undergraduate Studies and ISyE Professor

COE Outstanding Undergraduate Research Award

Alex Moran

Award presented by: Dr. Nicoleta Serban, ISyE Professor

Henry Ford Scholar Award

Sean Monahan

Award presented by: Dr. Nicoleta Serban, ISyE Professor

ISyE Outstanding Undergraduate Teaching Assistant Award 

Anubhav Jain

Award presented by: Dr. Dawn Strickland, ISyE Advisor and Instructor

Kurt Salmon Associates Scholarship in Industrial & Systems Engineering

Aissatou “Bani” Bah, Siham Adous, and Juan Tovar

Awards presented by: Fran Buser and Stacey Gangloff, ISyE Academic Advisors

KS2 Technologies, Inc. Entrepreneurship Award

Ryan Hawks

Award presented by: Richard Nuskind, KS2 Technologies

KS2 Technologies, Inc. Innovative Technology Award

Saeed Siddiqi and David Wang

Award presented by: Richard Nuskind, KS2 Technologies

Georgia Tech IIE Student Chapter Student Awards

Outstanding Senior Award

Siham Adous

Rising Star Award

Krishna Kajaria

Most Successful International Student Award

Harshil Goel

In this interview, Berry talks about his growing experience with supply chain engineering, his focus on cultural diversity here at Georgia Tech, and what he learned from studying abroad.

Why did you select Georgia Tech for your university experience, and why did you choose ISyE for your major?

From an early age, I knew I wanted to go to a top-ranked engineering school. Living in Albany, Georgia, I didn’t always have as many course options as I would have liked. However, based on family travel experiences, I also knew I would want an education that focused on the global experience and solving global problems. I visited Georgia Tech during a Connect With Tech admissions event and a scholarship weekend. I had never before met such a concentrated group of passionate, engaged, and brilliant students who all not only had dreams but had even started on plans to achieve those dreams.

When I went to the ISyE session at FASET [Tech’s 1^st year orientation program], I knew applied systematic thinking that not only relied on math and data, but also on a leader’s intuition and insights, would be for me. ISyE also provided me the technical background that has given me credibility and experience to begin to tackle the global problems that initially attracted me to the field.

You are developing significant experience in supply chain engineering. Why have you chosen to focus on this particular aspect of ISyE?

Corporate America. School systems. Governmental functions. NGOs. At the core of many large and small organizations is the quality, robustness, and responsiveness of their supply chains. Even with many of the buzz words that are popular today such as Big Data, sustainability, and corporate social responsibility, many organizations implement projects in these areas through their supply chain.

I think an organization’s supply chain has the greatest possibility of impacting individuals on a local and global scale. That’s why I chose it: the potential for impact.

This selection has also immensely helped shape my academics. For example, I also dreamed of being able to study abroad. Because of ISyE’s Beijing-Singapore program, I was able to take classes from the best professors in the world and gain a global perspective on supply chain and logistics management. With two other study abroad programs offered through the Denning & Technology Management program, I have been able to explore the relationship between global supply chains and how they drive macroeconomics and geopolitics.

You’re involved in a wide variety of campus-based activities. Briefly describe a couple of your current roles and what you do for each of them.

I am currently a member of the Student Government Association, having previously served as class president for three years, and as the co-chair of the Cultural and Diversity Affairs Committee. I’ve gotten to work on some of the underlying problems of inclusion and diversity at GT, from bringing cultural organizations together through round table discussions to planning Atlanta-wide Intercollegiate events aimed at fostering collaboration between the different Atlanta schools.

I have always been passionate about mentoring, whether being mentored or having my own mentees. I currently have over 25 Tech mentees in both official and unofficial capacities; they are nicknamed the Horde.

I’ve always believed that mentoring was the best way to build bridges at Georgia Tech, as well as to engineer cultural change on our campus. To this end, I am working with the New Student and Sophomore Programs Office and a talented group of student leaders to create K.N.I.T. [knowledge, nurturing, interactions, traditions], a 1^st-year campus-wide mentoring organization. We will have our first pilot semester this fall with over 80 mentors, and a bandwidth to connect and reach over 200 students!

You were the project manager for Psuedomorph Films for several years. This seems like a departure from your other activities. What interested you about working on film projects?

Many of my friends are creative, innovative, and artsy types who had beautiful ideas and grand visions. Together, we developed and expertise into telling meaningful stories. I wanted to use my organizational mindset to help make their visions a reality. Plus, we had a lot of fun! My favorite project was “The Difference.”

Diversity and sustainability are two areas where you have spent a considerable amount of your extracurricular time. What about these issues is important to you on a personal level?

For me, it comes down to in what type of community do I want to live. When I think of the best parts of my childhood, it was always getting to meet, learn about, and interact with people from all over the world. I was able to see firsthand how what I did in my local community could have large ramifications for another community thousands of miles away. I wanted that impact to be intentional and positive. When I think of my best friends at Tech, I notice that they come from all over the world—from here in Atlanta, to China, to Nigeria, to Columbia. So when we grab food and talk about growing up or the change we want to make in the world, it’s inherently a conversation about diversity and sustainability.

You have studied abroad several times. What have you learned from these experiences?

• Just go ahead and eat it, no matter what it is, and then ask what it is made of later. You’ll get to have so many more wonderful experiences without letting preconceived notions bog you down.
• Problem solving is great, and duly needed in many environments, but creating long-term and intercultural relationships is much more important.
• When you go abroad, history and politics really comes alive. It’s like diving into the pages of a textbook and being able to live out history.
• People have a natural curiosity about those from other cultures. Sometimes that may manifest in strange ways, but the underlying theme is curiosity.

The Harrison family, King in particular, had a close working and personal relationship with Brown over the 20 years prior to Brown’s death. In fact, King Harrison inherited Brown’s books and research materials after Brown died.

The reason for the endowment, according to Harrison, is because many graduate students in ISyE study supply chain management, and among the pioneers of the field, Brown certainly stands out as a person who should be known and taught. “He laid the groundwork for those of us out in the field who must try to build, teach, and support forecasting systems,” says Harrison.

Jan Vlachy, an ISyE Ph.D. student (OR 2017) advised by ISyE Professor Turgay Ayer (George Family Foundation Assistant Professor), is one of the two 2015-16 recipients. Vlachy says, “It is inspiring to be awarded a fellowship named after someone so famous, and I hope I will live up to the expectations."

Vlachy came to ISyE on the advice of his master’s degree advisor and because “ISyE is large and diverse, with a wide range of both methodologies and applications.”

His research is focused on using mathematical models to improve health care delivery: policy modeling for new health care delivery models and technology, but also more clinically relevant work. For instance, Vlachy, Ayer, and an undergraduate researcher, Lianyan Gu, are working with Children’s Hospital Colorado, specifically the emergency department, with doctors and nurses, to evaluate treatment of asthmatic children.

He explains, “For asthma, one study found that only about 24 percent of all doctors and nurses read, let alone follow, treatment guidelines. The rest of them rely on their gut or on what their teachers told them. But we have massive data from electronic health records, and what we’re looking for is whether it’s possible to extract the work flow from those records, and see what’s best for the children.” This will help health care professionals determine whether and when to give an asthmatic child a drug or how long an affected child can wait.

Vlachy continues, “There has been literature on discovering such work flows, but in general, what works in manufacturing, or banking, or the service industry does not work in health care. Health care processes are much more complicated. Each patient is so individual, and we don’t know what works for each patient. So that’s all part of the challenge: Was the different work flow appropriate for the patient, or was it a fluke?”

Eventually, Vlachy will work with health care professionals to see if the work flow algorithms he comes up with can help guide their clinical practice. Ultimately, the results of this research has application appeal to other emergency departments as well.

“It’s very validating to get some outside feedback on the work we are doing,” said Vlachy. “Often when we are submitting something or write up something, it takes time to see what impact it really has. We submit articles to journals and go through cycles and cycles of revisions. And any validation such as the Robert Goodell Brown fellowship says that we are doing something right.”

He notes, “[In ISyE] we are taught to think big.” Fittingly, Vlachy has big dreams for the future. He will spend this summer at the University of Chicago, thanks to a Data Science for Social Good Summer Fellowship. After graduating, he might like to work on significant social problems, perhaps as a data scientist for a mission-driven organization.

“The world is full of uncertainty, but the future is bright,” Vlachy adds.

The Capstone Design Expo is a right of passage for most engineering graduates, and while some projects turn into viable prototypes or business plans many students expect to finish their involvement with their projects when they leave Georgia Tech. That wasn't quite the case for industrial and systems engineering major Sangeeta Gadepalli and her team, who made such an impression on their project sponsor that they heard back from them almost two years later.

Read the interview with Gadepalli here: http://coe.gatech.edu/news/capstone-rome.

This year, the CoE inducted three alumni from the Stewart School of Industrial & Systems Engineering (ISyE) on April 16, 2016: Stan Chia, Deborah A. Nash, and Jocelyn Marie Stargel.

Stan Chia (B.S. IE 2005), Senior Vice President of Operations, GrubHub

Council of Outstanding Young Alumni

Chia received his bachelor's degree in industrial engineering from Georgia Tech in 2005, and he also holds an MBA from Emory University. Chia currently serves as senior vice president of operations at GrubHub, an online and mobile food-ordering company dedicated to connecting hungry diners with local takeout restaurants. His responsibilities include business development, operations infrastructure, sales, data operations, and general management of the local markets, as well as overseeing the Restaurants on the Run, Dining In, and Delivered Dish businesses. Since joining GrubHub in 2015, he has helped expand GrubHub Delivery from five to more than forty markets.

Prior to joining GrubHub, Chia held multiple senior leadership roles at Amazon, Cisco, and General Electric, running multibillion-dollar P&Ls as well as strategic supply chain organizations. His accomplishments at Amazon included the launch of the company’s first toy pop-up store.

The Council of Outstanding Young Engineering Alumni Award recognized alumni who have distinguished themselves through professional practice and/or service to the Institute, the engineering profession, or society at large. They are on the “fast track” and have made rapid advancement within their organizations, and they have been recognized for early achievements by others within their profession, field, or organization.

Deborah A. Nash (B.S. IE 1978), Senior Vice President, Microsoft Corporation (retired)

Engineering Hall of Fame

Nash received her bachelor’s degree in industrial engineering from Georgia Tech in 1978 and an honorary doctorate of sciences degree from the University of Arizona in 2001. She retired in 2003 after a career with Microsoft Corporation, where she served as senior vice president. Nash is credited with leading the sales, marketing, and support strategies for expanding use of Microsoft products from the desktop to the back office operations of large organizations. Previously, she was an executive at IBM Corporation, serving in a variety of positions related to hardware manufacturing and development. In her roles at Microsoft and IBM, she was instrumental in achieving many firsts for women in both technology companies, and she was twice named one of Fortune Magazine’s 50 Most Powerful Women in Business.

Her honors from Georgia Tech include membership in the College of Engineering’s Council of Outstanding Young Engineering Alumni and the Academy of Distinguished Engineering Alumni. Nash’s extensive involvement with her alma mater includes serving on the Georgia Tech Foundation Board of Trustees and the Campaign Georgia Tech Steering Committee, and as a mentor in the Georgia Tech Alumni Association Mentor Jackets program. She is also a past member of the Georgia Tech Advisory Board and an emeritus member of ISyE Advisory Board. In 2014 Nash also received the Joseph Mayo Pettit Distinguished Service Award at the Gold & White Honors Gala from the Georgia Tech Alumni Association.

Membership in the Engineering Hall of Fame is reserved for individuals holding an engineering degree or honorary degree from Georgia Tech. Those chosen have made meritorious engineering and/or managerial contributions during their careers.

Jocelyn Marie Stargel (B.S. IE 1982, M.S. IE 1986), CEO, Stargel Consulting

The Academy of Distinguished Engineering Alumni Award

Stargel earned both a bachelor’s and a master’s degree in industrial engineering from Georgia Tech, followed by a certificate from the Information Technology Management Program. She also holds a certificate in managerial leadership from Emory University’s Goizueta Business School. Stargel is the founder and CEO of Stargel Consulting, specializing in IT and risk management. In 2015, she retired from Southern Company Services, where she was responsible for managing the Business Assurance program. Prior to joining the Business Assurance team in 2006, Stargel served as director of external affairs for Southern Company Gas. She also held positions as assistant to the CEO of Southern Company Gas and assistant to the CIO of Southern Company Services, as well as management roles in the information technology organization at Southern Company.

Stargel is the incoming chair of the Advisory Board for ISyE, the past president of the Georgia Tech Women’s Alumni Network, and she was recently elected to the Georgia Tech Alumni Association Board of Trustees.

The Academy of Distinguished Engineering Alumni Award recognized alumni who have provided distinguished contributions to the Institute, profession, field, or society at large. Candidates are highly placed executives and are actively involved in engineering.

Read the full story here: http://www.rh.gatech.edu/features/rolling-robots

Alumna Jocelyn Stargel was inducted as the Advisory Board’s new chair. She will lead the board for a one-year term.

Jocelyn Stargel, Incoming Chair

Jocelyn Stargel (B.S. IE 1982, M.S. IE 1986) is the incoming chair of the Advisory Board for ISyE. Stargel is the founder and CEO of Stargel Consulting, specializing in IT and risk management. In 2015, she retired from Southern Company Services, where she was responsible for managing the Business Assurance program. Prior to joining the Business Assurance team in 2006, Stargel served as director of external affairs for Southern Company Gas. She also held positions as assistant to the CEO of Southern Company Gas and assistant to the CIO of Southern Company Services, as well as management roles in the information technology organization at Southern Company. Stargel is the past president of the Georgia Tech Women’s Alumni Network, and she was recently elected to the Georgia Tech Alumni Association Board of Trustees.

Stan Chia

Stan Chia (B.S. IE 2005) serves as senior vice president of operations at GrubHub. His responsibilities include operations infrastructure, business development, sales, data operations, and general management of the local markets, as well as oversight of the Restaurants on the Run, DiningIn, and Delivered Dish businesses. With a passion for creating disruptive customer engagement, Chia is focused on delivering an unparalleled experience for GrubHub diners while bringing superior value to restaurant partners. Since joining in April 2015, he has helped grow GrubHub Delivery from five to nearly 50 markets. Prior to joining GrubHub, Chia held multiple senior leadership roles at Amazon, Cisco, and General Electric, running multibillion dollar P&Ls, as well as strategic supply chain organizations. His experience spans many industries, including retail e-commerce, high tech, and energy. Chia also has an MBA from Emory University.

Jeanene Fowler

Jeanene Fowler (B.S. IE 1984) has over 20 years’ experience in technology and business, with a variety of roles including director of IT Application and Testing at MetLife, project manager/business analyst at various retail companies, small business owner, and over 10 years selling technology solutions for IBM. Fowler currently serves on the Georgia Tech Alumni Association Board of Trustees (2013-2016) and is the Greek Alumni Council Chair (2015-2016). She enjoys mentoring in the MentorJackets program, hosting for DinnerJackets, and volunteering at the Speed Networking and Capstone events. She also serves as Treasurer for the Alpha Gamma Delta House Association at Georgia Tech. Fowler also has an MBA from Kennesaw State University and completed the Certified Financial Planning Program at Oglethorpe University. She is a Certified ScrumMaster, Certified Scrum Product Owner, and a member of Scrum Alliance.

Dan Shinedling, Jr.

Dan Shinedling (B.S. IE 1992) possesses a keen entrepreneurial spirit and a passion for using computing to effectively automate business. Shinedling began his professional career as a developer and systems integration consultant. Looking to build something new, Shinedling co-founded KS2 Technologies, Inc. in 1995. Since that time, KS2 has become a leader in ERP, cloud, mobile, and infrastructure solutions with heavy emphasis on IBM and Oracle technologies. KS2 is a frequent recruiter and current employer of many Georgia Tech ISyEs. 

Moe Trebuchon

Moe Trebuchon (B.S. IE 1986) possesses more than 25 years of supply chain, strategy, and operational consulting experience. He has served as a partner in the IBM Global Business Services and PwC Consulting practices. During Trebuchon’s time with these firms, he has served multiple North America leadership roles including Retail Industry Leader, Business Analytics & Optimization Service Line Leader, and Supply Chain Service Line Leader. Throughout his career, Trebuchon’s primary focus has been on helping clients achieve impactful business transformation via development of strategies, operational designs, leverage of information technology, and organizational change adoption. Having led a broad base of clients through complex technology enabled change programs, Trebuchon is considered a subject matter leader in the application of demand forecasting, replenishment, WMS, TMS, order management, and omni-channel technology to the order fulfillment and delivery process.

Annie Walker

Annie Walker (B.S. IE 2002) currently serves as vice president of OTC Merchandising for Walmart U.S. Walker started her career with Walmart in 2002 as an industrial engineer. After spending two years with the Stores Engineering team, she supported the replenishment division in several capacities. Walker’s latest role in replenishment was serving as senior director of Replenishment for the General Merchandise division. In 2012, Walker transitioned from Replenishment to vice president/division merchandising manager Over the Counter. She is also a graduate of the Walmart Leadership Academy program.

Ron Allen and Johnson had a long-standing relationship that began when Allen was an undergraduate ISyE major at Tech. The initial relationship, Allen says, began with the first ISyE class he took at Tech, which was with Johnson: “Professor Johnson had such a reputation for being tough. And I was working about 20 hours a week and carrying a full load, so I had limitations on what I could do. I’m glad I didn’t drop the class! What he taught us to do was think outside the box; [he] challenged us to do some nontraditional thinking in every aspect of the class.”

Eventually Johnson helped Allen get his first job with Delta, a part-time role as a methods analyst in the Methods department, while Allen was still a student. This led to a 34-year career with Delta for Allen, who served as Delta’s CEO for 10 years until 1997.

As for what he hopes the ISyE studio endowment will accomplish, Allen says, “It’s primarily focused on undergraduate students; it’s an area where students can think out of the box, get out of the norm, and think in extraordinary ways, and that is what Cecil Johnson stood for. He taught people to be contrarians and not just take what you see in front of you as the norm, [but] to think about different ways of accomplishing different types of goals.”

“You never forget someone like that,” Allen adds, “a mentor and friend.”

The ISyE studio was established to provide ISyE students with a workspace to foster collaboration, encourage interaction, practice presentations, and gain tutorial assistance. Students have access to the latest technology to complete team projects, presentations, and videos to name a few.

Johnson’s family, including his son, Gray, and his grandson, Alan – currently an ISyE student – also attended the ceremony.

A total of 17 teams from 11 universities took part in the competition. Graduate and undergraduate students used Walmart trend data and were tasked with developing solutions in two areas—customer segmentation and providing products for efficient shelf space usage.

Several Walmart executives were on hand for the 24-hour competition, including Karenann Terrell, executive vice president and chief information officer.

“You won’t find the kind of commitment these students displayed during the competition very often,” Terrell said. “I was incredibly impressed by the breadth and insight of the questions we were asked.”

For Northwestern student Eric Lundquist, who was part of the winning team in customer segmentation, the competition provided real-world perspective to what he is learning in the classroom.

“Statistics are only useful in the extent to which they provide business value and can be communicated clearly and understood fully. We spend a lot of time considering the business value and actionability of our approach, which is something that doesn’t always come up in some of our more technical academic coursework,” Lundquist said.

One of the groups, Team O-Mazing, sent by the Georgia Tech Business Analytics Center, took first place in the predictive analytics track of the competition, surpassing seven teams from other universities that also participated.

Georgia Tech’s Brian Burns said his team found the large amount of information allowed them to drill deeper into the company’s issues. “I’ve had experience with data-driven decisions prior to this competition, but what Walmart’s data set highlighted is that strategic decisions can become more granular as the volume and variety of information becomes larger,” Burns said.

In addition to the winning schools and the host team from Purdue, the competitors included entries from Indiana University, Michigan State University, Ohio State University, University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana, University of Iowa, University of Maryland, University of Rochester and University of Texas-Dallas.

The competition is believed to be the first data dive on a college campus. It was organized by Mohammad Rahman, associate professor of management at Purdue’s Krannert School of Management, and was the first major activity conducted by Purdue’s Business Information and Analytics Center.

The Class of 1934 Distinguished Professor Award recognizes outstanding achievement in teaching, research, and service. Instituted in 1984 by the Class of 1934 in observance of its 50th reunion, the award is presented to an active professor who has made significant, long-term contributions — contributions that would have brought widespread recognition to the professor, to his or her school, and to the Institute. The award includes a stipend of $20,000.

For further information, please see the full story here: http://www.news.gatech.edu/2016/04/11/thomas-earns-top-faculty-honor.

Harati earned her undergraduate industrial engineering degree (IE 2015) with an emphasis on quality and statistics at Georgia Tech. As an undergraduate student, she received the Henry Ford II Scholar Award and the President’s Undergraduate Research Award.

As an undergraduate researcher, Harati worked with ISyE Coca-Cola Associate Professor Nicoleta Serban, focusing on health care access. Specifically, Harati determined the supply and demand for primary care services for both children and adults. She also found that if Medicaid is expanded, overall access will not, in fact, be decreased due to higher demand and a resulting supply shortage.

As a graduate student at ISyE, Harati has continued this work, specifically in the areas of predicting a child’s risk for cavities based on demographic information and estimating the clinical risk levels for children insured by Medicaid.

About Harati’s award, Alan Erera, ISyE Associate Chair for Graduate Studies and Coca-Cola Professor, said, “Pravara should be proud of her accomplishments, and she is very deserving of this honor.  We are looking forward to see how she uses this fellowship award to make a major impact in our field and on our world.”

"The Graduate Research Fellowship Program is a vital part of our efforts to foster and promote excellence in U.S. science, technology, engineering and mathematics by recognizing talent broadly from across the Nation," said Joan Ferrini-Mundy, NSF assistant director for Education and Human Resources. "These awards are provided to individuals who have demonstrated their potential for significant research achievements, and they are investments that will help propel this country's future innovations and economic growth."

The fellowship provides three years of financial support within a five-year fellowship period ($34,000 annual stipend and $12,000 cost-of-education allowance to the graduate institution). That support is for graduate study that leads to a research-based master's or doctoral degree in science or engineering.

• Maintains a 4.0 GPA while pursuing a B.S. in industrial engineering, with a minor in international affairs and certificate in industrial/organizational psychology;
• Is a Stamps President’s Scholar;
• Serves as vice president for several campus organizations dedicated to student outreach, building community, and human rights;
• Has taken a trip to Iceland to study renewable energy and sustainability;
• Researches with Associate Professor Jarrod Hayes in Georgia Tech’s Sam Nunn School of International Affairs on the relationship between national security and climate change;
• Writes for Perpetual Change, Sehgal’s regularly updated blog at https://surajsehgal.wordpress.com.

Recently, Sehgal sat down for a Q&A about his internationally focused activities, his involvement with organizations dedicated to ending human trafficking, and the importance of a global perspective.

Why did you choose Georgia Tech for your college experience, and ISyE as your major?

I applied to 15 different colleges in high school and only two of them were in-state. Needless to say, I was pretty set on leaving Georgia (where I was born and brought up) to go out-of-state for college. However, the more I learned about Georgia Tech and about the different programs the university had to offer, the more appealing that it became.

I chose ISyE as my major because it provides me with a set of valuable skills applicable to almost every field. As someone who is interested in international affairs, I felt like ISyE would not only help me contribute to the field in meaningful ways but also allow me to act as a bridge between worlds – bringing together engineering and social science.

Many of your extracurricular activities involve a globally outward focus. What motivates your interest in this area?

I’ve been working with efforts to end human trafficking ever since high school. With the work I’ve done in this field – and any other activity for that matter – the main driver behind much of my interest has been sharing love and care with others. As I realized early on, I have been given many so opportunities by virtue of where I was born, which means the least I can do is try to help others experience some of those opportunities.

Talk about your time as a Summer Scholar in the European Union Program.

The program is called the EU-Brussels study abroad program, offered through Tech. It’s a 10-week summer program led by Georgia Tech faculty in which students take four 3-credit hour classes (12 credits total) on the European Union, European security, EU-U.S. relations, and human rights in Europe. Six weeks of the program takes place in Brussels, Belgium, in which students live with a host family in order to get a better feel for the unofficial capital of the EU and the culture.

The rest of the time is spent in other major cities of EU member states, including Paris, Berlin, Krakow, and Dublin. Throughout the 10 weeks of the program, we visited all kinds of official sites including NATO’s SHAPE Headquarters, the European Commission, the European Parliament, the Council of the European Union, the U.S. Embassy in Paris, the European Court of Human Rights, and more. In addition to learning from readings and lectures, the bulk of the material came from hands-on meetings and dialogue with officials, experts, diplomats, and policy makers.

Why were you interested in this particular program?

It seemed like a wonderful opportunity to explore places that I had never been to before while also studying the European Union. To me, it felt like learning about the EU was a valuable experience, integral to being a well-informed global citizen, regardless of my major.

You were recently a representative at the United Nation’s Youth Assembly and were asked to write about the experience for the Huffington Post. Please describe the experience.

As I wrote in the beginning of the Huffington Post article, there were “numerous panels, inspiring keynote speakers, and workshops with notable leaders in the fields of international development, human rights, and so much more. It was a remarkable opportunity to meet youth from all over the world engaged in life-changing work!”

Going into the Assembly, I didn’t know quite what to expect but was amazed to see just how many young people were gathered together. I met people from Iraq, Saudi Arabia, the United Kingdom, Canada, the United States, and more. And it seemed like they were all involved in well-intentioned and globally minded projects – everything from creating a nonprofit addressing education barriers in a local city in Mexico to having a well-followed blog and cleaning product line devoted to helping people live a waste-free lifestyle.

I am grateful that I had the opportunity to attend the Youth Assembly, because it helped me to see how the work that we do locally at an extracurricUnular level is really part of a much bigger, global youth movement trying to make the Earth a more habitable, equal, and loving place.

Discuss your work in the Grand Challenges Living Learning program, particularly your current project on food insecurity at Georgia Tech.

The Grand Challenges team that I am working with is called the Food Fighters. We originally entered into second semester of our first year (spring 2015) as a group of six students who wanted help address the inefficiencies of international food aid. However, we quickly realized that if we wanted to make a meaningful impact, we would have to focus our attention more locally.

One population that really caught our eye was college students. We found that unlike households or children, there was surprisingly little literature on the topic of food insecurity experienced by college students. Any study or literature review that we could find on the topic indicated that college students were at high risk of experiencing food insecurity for some period of time during their four years in college. This seemed to be true both in community colleges and universities, and happening in places around the world (found in studies conducted in Hawaii, New York, and Australia).

If you are a student, you should not have to compromise your ability to focus on your academics and overall wellbeing simply because you are not able to get consistent access to basic nutrition. There are resources and services available for students who are having to make that tough choice between food and academics, including Klemis Kitchen, which is an on-campus food pantry. All you have to do is email Dr. Dana Hartley or the Dean of Students Office in order to get access.

Temporary assistance is already available to students. My Grand Challenges group is focused on trying to address why these services aren’t being used more and understanding how to empower students who are experiencing food insecurity to take action regarding their food situation.

One area of important focus for you is on the timely issue of victims’ rights and human trafficking. What would you like us to know about your work in this area, and about the issue of human trafficking in Atlanta, as well as around the world?

Ever since I was a junior in high school, I have been passionate about fighting against human trafficking.

It all started with a Community Ambassador Training held by youthSpark, a nonprofit that works to end child sex trafficking in the state of Georgia. After learning about such a heinous issue and becoming aware that it was such a big problem in my own state, I felt like I needed to act.

Soon after, I started a club in my school, worked to organize a field trip, speakers, and fundraisers to get students engaged, and was even able to intern at youthSpark, helping them find ways to get more teens involved.

I was excited to get started with One Voice Atlanta, a student organization on Tech’s campus that works to raise awareness about human trafficking, help victims, and prevent such crimes from occurring in the future.

Human trafficking is often associated with international cases, but what many fail to realize is that it also occurs domestically. I find it incredibly important to understand how this can happen to any person of any age, demographic, gender, or location.

How is your ISyE work complementary to your minor and certificate and to your globally focused extracurricular activities?

The purpose in pursuing all of these subjects – ISyE, international affairs, and industrial/organizational psychology – is to better my understanding of the world at many levels – global, system, and individual. They each provide unique skills and ways of viewing situations that are necessary when trying to address any kind of problem. To me, my extracurricular activities are ways in which I can take these diverse and interdisciplinary perspectives and apply them towards causes that can better the world.

Discuss the presence that meditation has in your life.

Meditation has had a presence in my life from a very young age. Both of my parents have been meditating since before I was even born, and they also taught meditation as volunteer instructors at home. So while my parents were careful never to impose meditation on me, I grew up with an understanding of the importance of pausing and taking a moment to connect with ourselves.

It wasn’t until I was 17 years old that I began to meditate on my own, and it wasn’t until I started college that I began to meditate much more regularly. For me, especially at a high-paced environment like Tech, meditation is a way of taking a step back, reminding myself that I am alive, and taking a moment to invest in myself, by doing something that many students seem to have forgotten – to just be.

The kind of meditation I do is called Heartfulness, which focuses on the heart, helping people connect with the very organ that literally keeps us alive and metaphorically brings us all together.

What does the future hold for you, both immediate and long-term?

I am really excited to be able to travel to Hyderabad, India to attend an International Youth Seminar on Heartfulness Meditation in late April. This conference is bringing over 2,500 young people from all over the world to gather together, meditate, and grow.

This summer, I will be interning at Hershey, working with their digital marketing team.

Regardless of what my post-graduation job is, I aspire to make sure that my life is always socially minded.

Segireddy, who earned his Bachelor of Technology in electrical engineering at the National Institute of Technology, Surat in India, traces his interest in supply chain engineering back to his post-undergrad work at Tata Motors – the automotive manufacturer of what Segireddy calls “the world’s cheapest car.”

“In India, there are 1.2 billion people, and not everyone can afford a car,” he explains. “The motivation is to bring a low-cost car so everyone can afford it.

“From a learning perspective, I joined this company when they started producing the first car, so it was a brand-new manufacturing plant. I was there from  week 1, so I started working in supply chain sourcing as soon as I got my EE degree.

“The business part of supply chain is what I was learning, and approaching supply chain as a business. I liked the way negotiations work, the way pricing strategies works, the way optimization works.”

From there, Segireddy wanted to further his education in supply chain engineering, so he began looking at graduate programs, particularly at schools in the U.S. The world-class faculty and the one-year master’s in supply chain engineering led him to Georgia Tech’s Stewart School of Industrial & Systems Engineering (ISyE). He also liked how the program is structured – with numerous consulting projects with industry partners that allow for real-world experience.

After graduation, Segireddy was hired by Cisco and immediately joined the company as a supply chain program manager in the company’s Leadership Development Rotational Program. This highly selective leadership program enables participants – of which Segireddy was only the seventh in 4 years – to rotate through four of the company’s six functional groups over a period of two years. “The end goal is that we will be well-rounded supply chain officials who can understand supply chain from every angle and side,” he notes. “Plus having an awareness of different cultures and how they move toward one common goal to have the supply chain work on the part of customers on time and at low cost.”

Spending six months each in one of four groups – including in Norway and in Holland – furthered Segireddy’s real-world education. For him, it was both fun and challenging whenever he joined a new team: “I really loved it. It can take two to four months to understand what you’re doing, but I shortened it to one to one and a half months and got up and running. I always wanted more, so I was very passionate about learning something new and to get on new projects.”

One of the biggest hurdles he faced with each new rotation was coming into a team as project manager and earning the new team’s trust in his guidance. He had to learn how to adapt not only to a new culture, but a new role and a new team, largely by networking and forming relationships that developed a mutual sense of trust. When he was in Amsterdam, Segireddy says, “I learned from my team members both how they could get buy-in, and how I could make them responsible for what they’re actually responsible for. That made me grow and gain the respect of the team over time.

“I learned the basics of project management during the course of my job, especially from my mentors, and additionally took a formal class last December. I believe that being a detail-oriented, pragmatic, curious, and effective communicator are key for being a great project manager. I always keep this in mind when I work on my projects.”

Now that Segireddy has completed Cisco’s Leadership Development Rotational Program, he is back in San Jose, CA working as a project manager for the Network Design and Management Team. He works on a team of 15 who manages a multi-billion dollar supply chain network for the company. He says the team is “accountable for supply chain design, network strategy and governance, and product move capabilities. I am currently working with the team to conceptualize and execute a new consolidated fulfillment model in Europe. This will help Cisco reduce its carbon footprint and make the company’s supply chain more adaptive, innovative, scalable and cost-effective.”

So back to the original question of why supply chain engineering: Segireddy explains, “We are responsible for designing and managing a complex network. What load should the supply chain network have? And what type of fulfillment should we have, and how are these going to keep up with customers’ demand?

“This is what really interests me and motivates me to come to work every day.”

In this Q&A, he talks about his interest in entrepreneurship, the lessons he’s learned by starting his own companies, and the advice he would give to his younger self.

Why did you decide to attend Georgia Tech for college?

Georgia Tech was attractive to me for several reasons, including its strong reputation as a top engineering school, and the co-op program that would help me get some real world experience and figure out what I wanted to do professionally. It also didn’t hurt that Georgia has a much better climate than all of the other schools I applied to, most of which were in the Northeast.

What made you choose ISyE for your major?

I came into Tech as a mechanical engineering major, but I didn’t really know what that meant. After my first quarter, I landed a great co-op job with Yamaha Motor Manufacturing, about 45 minutes south of Atlanta in Newnan, GA. I commuted from the Tech campus for two quarters and had a fantastic work experience, which included getting to test-ride prototype wave runners and Jet Skis in St. Augustine and the Florida Keys. However, I quickly realized that I didn’t want to spend my career in manufacturing and promptly switched majors to ISyE.

In my mind, ISyE offered the most breadth, with a curriculum that allowed me to take courses from other engineering and non-engineering disciplines, ranging from electrical and mechanical engineering labs to database design and industrial psychology.

You’ve been called a “serial entrepreneur.” What lights that perpetual spark for you?

The reason I decided to pursue entrepreneurship at a very early age is the same reason I was attracted to engineering, Georgia Tech, and ISyE: I love solving problems. And as a technology entrepreneur, I love the challenge of trying to solve problems in a way that hasn’t been done before.

What is it about startups specifically that interests you?

Creating solutions to problems that no one has successfully brought to market can be exceptionally challenging and fulfilling – all at the same time.

Building and growing a team can be equally stressful and rewarding. I particularly enjoy helping younger employees develop and watching them grow.  

Seeing the idea your team sketched out on a napkin come to life is exciting, but what makes all of the hard work and sacrifice worthwhile is when you’re able to effect positive change on a large scale, like we’re doing today by bringing increased transparency to the health care industry and transforming the way patients choose doctors, with the technology we developed at Digital Assent.

What initially lit the entrepreneurial spark for you?

I always knew I would start my own business. When I was little, I remember asking my parents why people didn’t just start their career as president or CEO of a company. If that’s what you want to be when you grow up, why start out doing something else?

As I got older, I realized the huge difference between working for someone else and having other people work for you. But I was still very naïve in thinking that any combination of smart Georgia Tech grads could pick an industry and a business concept and make it successful with enough hard work and dedication.

Little did I know that my first business partner and I would have to endure two to three years of making no money, while paying our employees market salaries, in order to keep our first startup alive through the “nuclear winter” that followed the dot-com bubble in the early 2000’s.

You have chosen to focus much of your energy in the health care industry. Why is this sector so attractive to you?

My first company, which took 10 years to go from startup to a successful exit, was not in health care. However, my most recent company (Digital Assent), and the company that acquired us (NRC), operate exclusively in the health care industry. The reason we chose health care when I started Digital Assent was largely due to timing. It was 2009, right before the last economic downturn, and every other industry we evaluated was struggling, except health care.

Health care, at that time, had $36 billion in federal stimulus funds to help fund an industry-wide conversion from paper to electronic health records (EHRs). We knew there would be a lot of opportunity in health care, and that’s continued to be the case. Atlanta’s health care technology companies are growing fast, and I don’t see it slowing down any time soon.

What does Digital Assent or NRC do that is so vital to the health care industry?

Our team helps large hospitals and health systems embrace the movement toward health care consumerism and increased transparency. As consumers spend more of their own money on health care – and have more choice and more access to information than ever before, they are shopping around for quality and value.

We take the patient satisfaction survey data that hospitals already collect and convert it into online ratings and reviews that are published – good and bad – to the hospital’s own website and to each doctor’s profile page. This is similar to what you see on websites like Amazon, TripAdvisor, and Yelp! – to help consumers make more informed decisions when selecting a new provider.

By tapping into these federally mandated in-depth patient satisfaction surveys, we’re able to guarantee that the millions of ratings we publish each year are all from verified patients who have seen a doctor at a particular hospital or clinic in the past 12 months.

Many of the health systems that have implemented our Transparency solution have experienced a 10 to 20 percent improvement in their patient experience scores and a significant increase in the number of patients scheduling new appointments with their doctors.

The health systems who have selected us as their transparency partner, including world-renowned organizations like Johns Hopkins and the Cleveland Clinic, collectively operate more than 300 hospitals and employ over 70,000 physicians.

Can you share an anecdote about one of the biggest challenges you’ve faced in your professional career?

A constant recurring challenge as a startup entrepreneur is not running out of money. It’s not a discrete event, it’s constant. Even after raising an initial $12 million to launch my last company – you’re still constantly worried about running out of money.

When you raised a lot of money, expectations for the speed and success of your business are also raised. You’re expected to move faster, which means a bigger burn rate. And, more often than not, figuring things out takes longer and costs more than you initially projected. It’s basically a race against the clock to figure out a viable, scalable business model before you run out of money – or have to go out and raise more money.

So, yes, there were many instances where we had months’ or weeks’ worth of cash left in the bank, and we needed to make something happen in order to keep the company going.

Most entrepreneurs will have experienced this at least once – probably many times over. It’s a roller coaster ride, unless you get lucky and knock it out of the park the first time, which rarely happens. It’s often one step forward and two steps back, which keeps things interesting.

If creating a successful startup was easy, everyone would do it.

If you could travel back in time to your time at Tech, what advice would you give your younger self?

Seek out one or two good mentors early in your career who share common interests and goals, even if they’re only a few years older than you.  Over time, surround yourself with advisors and mentors who will help you become a better business person and a stronger leader.

Try to figure out the things you’re not good at and stop doing them. I wasted a lot of time early in my career doing things that others could have done better and faster. Instead, try to surround yourself with people who are better than you in those areas.

Network with people of all different backgrounds and industries – I’m constantly surprised at the knowledge, insights and connections that weren’t initially apparent or obvious when I first met someone.

Don’t take yourself too seriously and don’t be afraid to ask questions – it’s the fastest way to learn. You can’t worry about sounding stupid.

If you’re interested in entrepreneurship, take advantage of all of the great resources available to you through Georgia Tech and in the Atlanta community. There wasn’t a big emphasis on entrepreneurship when I was starting out. Today, there are a rapidly growing number of incubators, accelerator programs, workshops, networking opportunities, and funding sources.

I recently sat down with Zeng to ask him about his research focus and his work with Amazon.

What is your educational background, prior to coming to Georgia Tech?

I’ve earned a bachelor’s in mathematics at Xi’an Jiaotong University in China, and a master’s degree in computer science at the University of Texas at Dallas.

Why did you choose Georgia Tech, and ISyE, for your graduate studies?

Georgia Tech is an excellent engineering school. In particular, ISyE is not only the largest industrial engineering program in the nation, but it also has many outstanding researchers. I was interested in mathematical modeling and optimization, and I believed I could strengthen my knowledge of operations research and contribute my talents here.

Give an overview of your dissertation, and why you focused on this area for it.

My dissertation stemmed from a collaboration between ISyE and the American Red Cross (ARC) back in 2012. Assistant Professor Turgay Ayer and Professor Chelsea White, ISyE Schneider National Chair in Transportation and Logistics, determined that ARC potentially benefit from a significant cost-savings if we could convince ARC to change their cryo – a key blood product – collection policies.

Since then, we’ve found very interesting theoretical results (structural policy), provided extensive numerical results, and delivered a decision support tool (DST). My dissertation – and our paper on this work –show that our innovative blood collection method can save up to 70 percent of the cost due to cryo collection, and our DST has been implemented.

We found that due to the tight time constraint necessary for making cryo, the ARC spent a lot of money in transporting whole blood product. We improved the cryo collection policies by taking the advantage of the backhaul in the blood collection. We built a Markov Decision Processes model to generate decision support and analyze the societal impact.

What was it like to win the GTRIC fellowship for your work on cryo collection?

I presented preliminary results of the ARC cryo collection at the GTRIC in 2013 and won the GTRIC fellowship. I want to thank Georgia Tech for providing me with this excellent opportunity. This experience gave me more confidence to dive deeply into the research.

Following on the heels of the GTRIC fellowship, what was it like to win the 2015 Doing Good with Good OR Award at INFORMS? What did this tell you about the importance of your work?

It is a great honor. This is a nice result of our three-year industry-academia collaboration. I want to express my highest gratitude to the people who are actively involved: Professor White, Professor Ayer, Professor Vengazhiyil, and Can Zhang, another Ph.D. student in ISyE. There is no doubt that we’ve been doing meaningful work, and we will continue to work with ARC to improve their blood collection policies.

Even though you’re graduating this semester, you’re already working full-time for Amazon Web Services as a research scientist. Could you describe what you do as a research scientist, and how you got connected to your current position?

Amazon is growing very fast — especially my division, AWS. There are quite a few operations research scientist positions in Amazon, and I was referred by my colleague, who is also a Yellow Jacket.

My typical work includes analyzing data, building mathematical models, and providing decision support. I work with Amazon’s business people and software engineers to optimize the cloud computing’s supply chain.

What is one of the most challenging projects you’ve worked on for Amazon?

Business problems are often poorly defined, and the raw data is very messy. I must spend considerable time learning the domain knowledge from the stakeholders, then spend some time familiarizing myself with the data – then clean it up. Sometimes, I must make a trade-off between optimality and complexity to deliver results in a timely manner.

What do you bring to Amazon as a Ph.D. in ISyE that you might not otherwise be able to contribute?

There are quite a few Yellow Jackets at Amazon! I think as a Ph.D. in ISyE, I contribute my expertise in operations research as follows:

1. Think about the business problem holistically, and possibly propose a new prototype.

2. Use up-to-date technology to solve the problem and provide better decision support.

3. Similar to what a project manager does, work with business people and developers to implement a better method and make an impact on the business.

What do you like to do in your free time?

I love to work out. I went to the Campus Recreation Center almost every day at Georgia Tech. Living in the Northwest, I now like hiking. I also like to cook, making healthy food for myself. I love magic tricks.

What, if any, are your post-graduation plans?

I will continue to learn new things, work hard, and make an impact in my company.

About the Baker award, Edwin Romeijn, ISyE H. Milton and Carolyn J. Stewart School Chair and Professor, said, “This is an incredible, very well-deserved honor. We are very glad to have Jan here at ISyE, with everything he contributes to the school.”

Shi received the award for his scholarly contribution and achievements in the area of quality science and engineering for multistage manufacturing systems. In his research, he created a set of foundational mathematical models and associated tools to integrate system theory with advanced data analytics to support modeling, design optimization, operation monitoring, root cause diagnosis, and adaptive control of quality in multistage manufacturing systems.  Due to the nature of interdisciplinary research, his work has won numerous best paper awards from several professional societies, including IIE, ASME, SME/NAMRI, and INFORMS. He is also a Fellow of INFORMS, ASME, IIE, and an Academician of IAQ (International Academy for Quality). 

The implementations of Shi’s methodologies have made significant impacts in industrial practice. As an example, his methodologies for multistage system has been adopted by Ford, GM, and Daimler-Chrysler in their vehicle programs and led to significant variation reduction in more than 20 assembly plants. The implementation in Chrysler Jefferson North Assembly Plant led it to 2mm six sigma body assembly variation, which was the first North American plant to have achieved this world-class dimensional quality.  His data fusion research, via collaboration with OG Technologies Company, led to early detection or prevention of defects in steel mills. Those algorithms has been implemented in OGT’s HotEye®/PRii™/PPS™ systems, which are in use by over 40 plants in 14 countries including the U.S., Canada, China, France, Germany, and Japan. The implementation of the technology has resulted in over 100 million dollars in cost savings, 1.2 billion KWh in energy savings, and 50,000 tons of CO2 emission reduction per year.

In addition to his research achievements, Shi has been successful in advising graduate students into independent and mature academic researchers. Twenty former Ph.D. students of his have become a faculty member in an industrial engineering program; among them, seven have received the NSF CAREER Award and one received the NSF PECASE Award.

Plumlee’s research interests include the interface of data and modeling, specifically in methods for experimentation and uncertainty quantification for complex systems.

Out of 526 doctoral degrees conferred by Georgia Tech in 2015, only nine were chosen to receive the Sigma Xi Best Dissertation Award. In addition, with the award given to Plumlee, the honor returns to ISyE after eight years. Previous winners include Tirthankar Dasgupta in 2008 (advisor: Jeff Wu, ISyE Coca-Cola Chair in Engineering Statistics and Professor); Wuqin Lin in 2006 (advisor: Jim Dai, ISyE Adjunct Professor); and Jean-Philippe Richard in 2003 (advisor: George Nemhauser, ISyE A. Russell Chandler III Chair and Institute Professor).

Plumlee’s dissertation advisers were Roshan Vengazhiyil, ISyE Professor, and Jianjun Shi, ISyE Carolyn J. Stewart Chair and Professor. His thesis studied methodologies to assist users in blending computational models and data. This research seeks to design and evaluate methods for the combined usage of observational data and computational models to match the technological gains in sensor and storage technologies. Plumlee's findings impact economic sectors including health care, both clinical and operational, manufacturing, and energy.

About the award, Shi and Vengazhiyil said, “This is great news. Matt’s dissertation studies methodologies in uncertainty quantification, an emerging research area to which Matt has made unique and important contributions. He truly deserves this recognition. Furthermore, the fact that the Sigma Xi award has returned to ISyE after eight years is a triumph both for Matt and his work, and for the School itself.” 

Plumlee’s dissertation excellence was also recognized by the Institute of Industrial and Systems Engineering (IISE) with the Ph.D. Thesis Award for 2016.

“We are proud that ISyE’s hard work and dedication to excellence in education and research continues to be recognized,” said Edwin Romeijn, professor and H. Milton and Carolyn J. Stewart Chair. “This long-held position as # 1 in its field is a tribute to our world-class faculty, outstanding students, dedicated staff, and engaged alumni who can be found around the globe in leadership positions.”

Georgia Tech’s College of Engineering is ranked seventh in the U.S., tied with the University of Illinois-Urbana-Champaign. Five of its engineering programs are ranked in the top five in the country, continuing its overall strong showing in individual disciplines.