WHERE: UN City, Copenhagen
WHAT: Panels and interactive sessions focusing on topics such as:
TO REGISTER ONLINE please visit chhs.gatech.edu/conference/2017/registration.
*As the 2017 conference will be hosted at the United Nations City, it will be free of charge. All attendees must be registered online prior to the event and must present an official form of government-issued photo ID to enter the UN City conference venue.
OVERVIEW:
The HHL Conference is pleased to announce the opening Keynote address from Dr. Richard Brennan, Director of Emergency Operations, Emergencies Programme, World Health Organization (WHO) in geneva, who led the Ebola Response from October 2014 to January 2016 as the Director at the WHO HQ. Dr. Brennan now oversees WHO’s response to health emergencies globally as part of the new Emergencies Programme which brings together several departments to streamline WHO’s role in emergencies globally, from prevention and preparedness to response, and from humanitarian emergencies to disease outbreaks. See full bio here.
Each year the Conference on Health & Humanitarian Logistics (HHL) provides an open forum for the discussion of challenges and new solutions in disaster preparedness and response, long-term development and humanitarian aid, and global health delivery. This neutral platform encourages learning and collaboration within and across institutions; promotes system-wide improvements in organizations and the sector as a whole; identifies important research issues; and establishes priorities in terms of strategies, policies and investments.
Speakers and participants in the event come from across global health and humanitarian sectors, from governments, NGOs, foundations, private industry, and academia, and share diverse perspectives in health and humanitarian challenges. The agenda features keynote addresses, panel discussions, focused interactive workshops, oral presentations, lunchtime group discussions, and interactive poster sessions covering a broad set of research topics and applications.
Submissions were accepted for 3 categories this year: interactive workshops, oral presentations, and posters, which explore challenges and solutions for building efficient and effective supply chains for health and humanitarian challenges. Particular topics of interest include public private partnerships, innovative uses of data or technology, and creating sustainable supply chain systems.More information about these sessions is available here. The final list of presentation, workshop sessions, and posters will be online at the links here as they are confirmed.
2017 Conference Co-organizers:
2017 Speakers and presenters include representatives from:
Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Centers for Disease Control & Prevention, (CDC), Central Medical Stores Trust of Malawi, Chemonics International, DHL, Earthquake Reconstruction & Rehabilitation Authority (ERRA) Pakistan, GS1 Nigeria, Global Scientific Solutions for health, Imperial Health Sciences, John Snow Inc., Laerdal Global Health, Logistimo India, Medecins Sans Frontieres, National Medical Stores Uganda, National Primary Health Care Development Agency of Nigeria, Nexleaf Analytics, North Star Alliance, Partnership for Supply Chain Management, UCLA, Vienna University of Economics and Business, UNICEF Supply Division, UN World Food Programme, UPS, World Health Organization, USAID, and more.
]]>Devyon applied and successfully enrolled in Juma, and found a path to earn money, build his resume, and pave his future. As part of the program, Devyon took Georgia Tech LEAP courses to learn more about supply and logistics and the career paths the field has to offer. His dedication to the job, his willingness to go above what was expected of him and his attention to detail were characteristics that made him stand out to Juma’s Enterprise Managers. After successfully completing Juma’s training program, Devyon secured a job at UPS, a Juma Atlanta job placement partner. Today, Devyon has stable employment and, after successfully passing UPS’ Supervisor Exam, became a Shift Manager.
Learn about Devyon Johnson's story in the Juma website.
]]>Zuma promotes participants to earn while they learn, so while going to school during the week to pursue her GED, Zaria took GT LEAP courses at night and worked in the Juma Atlanta concessions operations group on the weekend. Through perseverance and her will to succeed, she later secured fulltime employment within the JUMA organization.
At the Future of Work 2017 summit sponsored by The Atlantic, Zaria was asked about her experience. She commented, “sometimes, people just need a second chance and an opportunity to take advantage of it.” The experience has opened her eyes to the possibilities and Ms. Walker has aspirations to be a crime scene investigator. Zaria plan to pursue further education and make that dream a reality some day.
]]>On April 19th, the Georgia Tech Center for Health & Humanitarian Systems (CHHS) brought together faculty across campus to present new research and technology relating to resilience, social impact, public health, international development, and other topics.
Professors Catherine Ross, Margaret Wagner Dahl, and Ellen Zegura shared research, information on new project-based courses, and internships taking place at the Center for Quality Growth and Regional Development, Computing for Good (C4G) at the College of Computing, the Serve Learn Sustain Initiative (SLS), Data Science for Social Good, and the Enterprise Innovation Institute (Ei2), as well as related partnerships with local and federal government and organizations around the world.
Dr. Catherine Ross (http://catherine.ross.gatech.edu/)
Catherine L. Ross is the Harry West Professor and Director of Georgia Institute of Technology’s Center for Quality Growth and Regional Development and Deputy Director of the National Transportation Center for Productivity and Management. She is an internationally respected researcher and speaker on issues of land use, transportation planning, health impact assessment (HIA), and quality growth. She is a member of the National Academy of Public Administration. Her last two books are Megaregions Planning for Global Competitiveness, Island Press 2009, and Health Impact Assessment in the United States, Springer 2014. In 2009, Dr. Ross was selected to advise the Obama Administration on the first‐ever White House Office of Urban Affairs. She earned a BA degree from Kent State University followed by a Master's Degree and Doctorate from Cornell University in Regional Planning. She completed post-doctorate work at the University of California, Berkeley.
Margaret Wagner Dahl (http://www.ti.gatech.edu/about/people/margaret-dahl)
Margaret Wagner Dahl is the Associate Vice President (AVP) for Health IT Extension Services. She works specifically with health care providers and the health IT industry by making Georgia Tech’s interoperability and integration resources accessible, as well as startup company technology validation and workforce training programs. Most recently, Dahl was AVP for Economic Development at the University of Georgia (UGA) and Director of the Georgia BioBusiness Center, a biotechnology business incubator tied closely to interdisciplinary research at UGA. Before UGA, she was Director of Operations at the Austin Technology Incubator, The University of Texas at Austin (U.T.). Prior to U.T. Austin, she was Director of Licensing at the University of Washington’s Office of Technology Transfer and previously co-founded two successful startup companies. Dahl has a Bachelor’s in Sociology and Geography from the National University of Ireland-Maynooth in County Kildare, Ireland. She currently serves as Trustee for the American Hospital Association’s Council on Governance, Trustee for the Georgia Hospital Association and Vice Chair for Athens Regional Health System.
Dr. Ellen Zegura (http://www.cc.gatech.edu/fac/Ellen.Zegura)
Professor Zegura currently chairs the School of Computer Science in the College of Computing. Dr. Zegura began the Compute for Good (C4G) initiative to leverage computing to study and address pressing societal problems. The C4G vision is that computing and related disciplines can play a critical role in addressing systemic societal problems, and that tackling such problems can push the intellectual boundaries of the disciplines. One realization of C4G is a project-based senior/graduate class. Dr. Zegura’s research interests include the development of wide-area (Internet) networking services and mobile wireless networking, such as those utilized by applications distributed across multiple administrative domains (e.g., web, file sharing, multi-media distribution). She is currently working on projects in these areas funded by DARPA and NSF as well as the “Internet for Everyone Really (IFER)” project to design “a future Internet architecture for all 6 Billion of the world’s people, starting from considerations of the 3 Billion not currently reached by the Internet.” Dr. Zegura has been a faculty of Georgia Tech since 1993. She received a B.S. degree in Computer Science and in Electrical Engineering (1987), an M.S. degree in Computer Science (1990), and a D.Sc. in Computer Science (1993) all from Washington University, St. Louis.
Wed, April 19th, 2017, 3pm – 6pm, East Architecture Building, Auditorium (Classroom 123) (Building 76 on map) *Detailed instructions below. Please RSVP online here (Event is free, light refreshments will be provided).
]]>INFORMS Fellows
Anderson-Interface Chair and Professor Shabbir Ahmed and H. Milton and Carolyn J. Stewart School Chair and Professor Edwin Romeijn were elected as 2017 INFORMS Fellows.
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.
Elected Position
Coca-Cola Professor Alan Erera has been elected vice president/president-elect of INFORMS’ Transportation Science and Logistics Society (TSL). His term as president of TSL will begin in 2019. TSL is one of INFORMS’ largest societies, with nearly 900 members whose research interests focus on applied operations research and management science for the transportation and logistics sector.
Winners
Anderson-Interface Chair and Professor Shabbir Ahmed, A. Russell Chandler III Chair and Institute Professor George Nemhauser, and Juan Pablo Vielma (Ph.D. IE 09) won the INFORMS Computing Society Prize for their pioneering work on mixed integer linear programming formulations for piece-wise linear functions.
George Family Foundation Early Career Professor and Assistant Professor Turgay Ayer; Schneider National Chair in Transportation and Logistics and Professor Chip White; Ph.D. students Can Zhang and Chenxi Zeng; and Professor Roshan Vengazhiyil won first prize in the MSOM Practice-based Research Competition for their paper “Analysis and Improvement of Blood Collection Operations.”
The paper focused on how the group’s work impacted the American Red Cross’s blood collection operations.
Ph.D. student Rui Gao won the SAS Data Mining Best Paper Award for “Wasserstein Distributional Robustness and Regularization in Statistical Learning,” co-authored by Associate Professor Anton Kleywegt and Xi Chen (NYU).
The paper establishes a close connection between distributionally robust stochastic optimization and regularization in statistical learning. Such connection suggests a systematic way to regularize high-dimensional, non-convex problems, which is demonstrated through the training of generative adversarial networks in deep learning.
Guido Lagos (Ph.D. IE 17), currently a postdoc at the Center for Mathematical Modeling of Universidad de Chile, won the Best Student Paper Award from the INFORMS Applied Probability Society. The award was for his work “On the Euler Discretization Error of Brownian Motion about Random Time.” The paper was co-authored with Lagos’ advisor, Adjunct Associate Professor Ton Dieker.
In the paper, they derive new weak limits on the error of approximating Brownian motion by its Euler discretization about times of extremes and about times of barrier-hits. They then extend these results to give the asymptotic error of approximating Gaussian random walks by Brownian motion. More importantly, though, with this collection of results they clarify the connection between several papers in the literature where a specific constant involving the Riemann zeta function has appeared. These papers cover different areas and span several decades, and the precise connection between them was an intriguing open question until now.
Assistant Professor Siva Theja Maguluri and Rayadurgam Srikant received the Best Publication in Applied Probability Award, which is awarded every two years by the INFORMS Probability Society, for “Heavy Traffic Queue Length Behavior in a Switch Under Max-Weight Algorithm.”
The paper represents a major breakthrough in resource scheduling. It positively settles the conjecture that the max-weight scheduling is delay optimal in the heavy traffic regime in which the system is fully loaded. Furthermore, Maguluri and Srikant establish how the waiting time under the maximum weight scheduling policy scales with the number of input streams when compared with any other scheduling policy in the heavy traffic regime.
Ph.D. student Ethan Mark won the INFORMS Poster Competition for “Reducing Discarded Organs and Improving Physician-patient Decision-making via Decision-support Tools and Systems Optimization,” in collaboration with Professor David Goldsman; William W. George Chair and ADVANCE Professor and Interim Associate Dean for Faculty Development & Scholarship, College of Engineering Pinar Keskinocak; Hannah Smalley (Ph.D. IE 12); Associate Professor Joel Sokol; and Dr. Brian Gurbaxani of the CDC.
The team built an interactive program that can help a transplant recipient choose between accepting an organ that is potentially infected by a disease or waiting for a standard organ. The organs that were considered are the heart, liver, kidney, and lung. The diseases that were considered were hepatitis C, hepatitis B, HIV, and encephalitis.
Assistant Professor Andy Sun, Alvaro Lorca (Ph.D. OR 16), Eugene Litvinov, and Tongxin Zheng won the INFORMS ENRE Best Publication in Energy Award for “Multistage Adaptive Optimization for the Unit Commitment Problem.”
The work proposes a new generation of robust optimization models and efficient algorithms for operating future large-scale power systems with significant penetration of stochastic renewable energy sources. The new models have been implemented and tested on the real system operated by the ISO New England, a leading company in the U.S. electric energy market, and have shown significant advantages in reducing generation cost and increasing reliability of the power system over current industry practice and existing approaches.
Ph.D. student Can Zhang, in collaboration with George Family Foundation Early Career Professor and Assistant Professor Turgay Ayer and Professors Atalay Atasu and Beril Toktay from Scheller College of Business, won first prize in the MSOM Society’s Best Student Paper Competition for “Mechanism Design for Medical Surplus Product Allocation.” The paper also received first prize in the INFORMS-wide Doing Good with Good OR Competition Student Paper Competition.
The MSOM student paper prize is one of the most prestigious awards a Ph.D. student can receive from INFORMS, and the competition drew 87 entrants this year. Winning the Doing Good with Good OR competition is an important indication of the quality and applicability of an academic paper on socially responsible business.
The paper studied how Medshare, a medical surplus recovery organization, matched the medical supply surplus in the U.S. with medical needs in the developing world, and developed novel and implementable solutions for Medshare’s supply and demand match problem through recipient selection.
First Runner-up
Professor Eva Lee and an interdisciplinary team of students that includes ISyE undergraduates Ryan Eckhaus, Shefali Jain, Kevin Kwon, Joe Malecki, and Alan Thomas; ISyE master’s students Chenman Cheng and Kumbit Hwang; and Yuanbo Wong, Autumn Phillips, and Surina Puri were selected as the first runner-up for the NSF Health Organization Transformation Innovation award for “Machine Learning for Evidence-based Practice, Risk Prediction, and Optimal Care Coordination.”
Third-Place
Ph.D. student Xiaowei Yue received third place in the INFORMS Best Poster Presentation Award for “Ultra-high Precision Predictive Assembly of Composite Fuselage Joins via Surrogate Model Based Control.” This is a joint work with Ph.D. student Yuchen Wen and Jeffrey Hunt (Boeing).
Honorable Mentions
Alvaro Lorca (Ph.D. 16), who was advised by Assistant Professor Andy Sun and is now an assistant professor in the Departments of Electrical Engineering and Industrial Engineering at the Catholic University of Chile, received an honorable mention in the INFORMS George B. Dantzig Dissertation Award for his Ph.D. thesis, “Robust Optimization for Renewable Energy Integration in Electrical Power Systems.”
Weijun Xie (Ph.D. OR 17), who was advised by Anderson-Interface Chair and Professor Shabbir Ahmed and is now an assistant professor in the ISE Department at Virginia Tech, received an honorable mention in the George Nicholson Student Paper Competition for “On Deterministic Reformulations of Distributionally Robust Joint Chance Constrained Optimization Problems.”
Finalists
The joint work of George Family Foundation Early Career Professor and Assistant Professor Turgay Ayer; Schneider National Chair in Transportation and Logistics and Professor Chip White; Ph.D. students Can Zhang and Chenxi Zeng; and Professor Roshan Vengazhiyil, “American Red Cross: Analytics-based Methods Improve Blood Collection Operations,” was selected as a finalist for the Franz Edelman Award for Achievement in Operations Research and the Management Sciences.
Ph.D. student Junzhuo Chen was a finalist for the Quality, Statistics, & Reliability Student Paper Award for “S3T: An Efficient Score Statistic for Spatio-temporal Surveillance,” in collaboration with Professor Seong-Hee Kim and Harold R. and Mary Anne Nash Early Career Professor and Assistant Professor Yao Xie.
Ph.D. student Rui Gao’s paper, “Wasserstein Distributional Robustness and Regularization in Statistical Learning,” co-authored by Associate Professor Anton Kleywegt and Xi Chen (NYU), was also a runner-up for the INFORMS Computing Society Student Paper Award.
Joshua Hale (Ph.D. IE 17), Fouts Family Early Career Professor and Associate Professor Enlu Zhou, and Jiming Peng were finalists for the Journal of Global Optimization Best Paper Award, for their work "A Lagrangian Search Method for the P-median Problem."
Fifth-year undergraduate student Chungjae Lee was a finalist for the Undergraduate Operations Research Prize for building on the work of his spring 2017 Senior Design Team, “Contact Tracing Protocol.” The team was co-advised by William W. George Chair and ADVANCE Professor and Interim Associate Dean for Faculty Development & Scholarship, College of Engineering Pinar Keskinocak and Dr. Brian Gurbaxani from the CDC.
Professor Eva Lee and a team including Ph.D. student Xin Wei, Francine Baker (Grady), Michael D. Wright (Grady), and Alexander Quarshie (Morehouse School of Medicine) were finalists for the Daniel H. Wagner Prize for Excellence in Operations Research Practice for their work, "Outcome-driven Personalized Treatment Design for Managing Diabetes."
Lee and Ph.D. student Zhuonan Li, Ling Ling (MS Statistics 12), Ankit Agarwal (MSIE 2013), Michael Wright, and Alexander Quarshie were also finalists for the INFORMS Decision Analysis and Society of Decision Professionals Practice Award for “Reducing Surgical-site Infections.”
Ph.D. student Xiaowei Yue was a finalist for the SAS Data Mining Best Paper Award for “Tensor Mixed Effects Model with Applications in Nanomanufacturing Inspection,” in collaboration with Jin Gyu Park (FSU); Richard Liang (FSU); and Carolyn J. Stewart Chair and Professor Jianjun Shi.
Yue was also a finalist for the Quality, Statistics & Reliability Best Refereed Paper Award for “Effective Model Calibration via Sensible Variable Identification and Adjustment, with Application to Composite Fuselage Simulation,” in collaboration with Rui Tuo (ISyE visiting assistant professor); Jeffrey Hunt (Boeing); Carolyn J. Stewart Chair and Professor Jianjun Shi; and Yan Wang (ISyE visiting scholar).
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]]>Along with serving as the George Chair, Keskinocak is also the Advance Professor for the College of Engineering; the associate director of research for the Health Systems Institute, and the co-director of the Center for Health and Humanitarian Systems at Georgia Tech. Before joining the ISyE faculty in 1999, Keskinocak also served as a post-doctoral fellow at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center.
Her research focuses on applications of operations research and management science with societal impact (particularly health and humanitarian applications) and supply chain management, with an emphasis on resource allocation, revenue management, production planning/scheduling, and logistics/transportation. She received B.S. and M.S. degrees in industrial engineering from Bilkent University in Ankara, Turkey, in 1991 and 1992, and a Ph.D. in operations research from Carnegie Mellon University in 1997.
Kim Kurtis, who has served as CoE’s associate dean for faculty development and scholarship since 2014, has been named interim chair of the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering, effective July 1, while a search for a new school chair is being conducted.
“Pinar will do an outstanding job in her new role as interim associate dean for the College of Engineering, and we are grateful to her for stepping into this complex and important role,” said May. “We look forward to Pinar’s leadership in this area .”
]]>The Master of Science in Supply Chain Engineering (MSSCE) is a graduate degree program created to meet growing demand for business-savvy engineers who can design and synchronize highly-complex global supply chains. The program began in fall 2010 with an initial cohort of 12 transfer students from Panama. The first full class began in fall 2011, with 46 students who graduated in 2012. The program now graduates about 50 students each year, with approximately 275 program alumni as of summer 2017.
In August 2016, Amazon partnered with Georgia Tech and ISyE to introduce the MSSCE Systems Design track. The Systems Design track is designed to provide students with a deeper knowledge of designing systems both within the walls of a logistics facility and across facilities in a complex, ever-changing supply chain network. With $665,000 in funding over five years, the Systems Design track includes courses in mechatronics and robotics through Tech’s Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering, ranked second nationally, as well as a course in industrial systems design.
The Amazon partnership funds four fellowships per year for students, who also receive priority for Amazon internships. The eight fellowship recipients thus far include an international contingent — one from Mexico, one from Belgium, and three from India — as well as two students from the U.S. Half of the recipients are female.
ISyE also is partially home to the new Online Master of Science in Analytics (OMSA). The OMSA, Georgia Tech’s second degree-at-scale, was announced in January 2017 on the edX platform. A collaboration between the Scheller College of Business and the Colleges of Engineering and Computing, the program is produced by Georgia Tech Professional Education and is offered for less than $10,000 tuition. Designed to be completed in one to two years, the OMSA offers the same interdisciplinary curriculum as the on-campus program, leveraging Georgia Tech’s strengths in statistics, operations research, computing, and business.
The first OMSA cohort began in August 2017, welcoming approximately 300 adult learners of which 26 percent have graduate degrees. The average age of this first cohort is 34, and 47 percent of the candidates are Georgia residents. This summer, Georgia Tech and edX also launched an Analytics MicroMasters© Program. The program has over 13,500 learners, 169 of which are in the verified track, progressing toward a completion certificate.
The machine learning (ML) Ph.D. program is a collaborative venture between Georgia Tech’s Colleges of Computing, Engineering, and Sciences through the Center for Machine Learning at Georgia Tech, an Interdisciplinary Research Center that is both a home for thought leaders and a training ground for the next generation of pioneers.
The ML Ph.D. began in August 2017. The initial class has 19 students, all drawn from incoming and current PhD. students from eight schools across three colleges at Georgia Tech: the Schools of Computational Science and Engineering, Computer Science, and Interactive Computing in the College of Computing; the Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering, the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, the Guggenheim School of Aerospace Engineering, and ISyE in the College of Engineering; and the School of Mathematics in the College of Sciences.
ML Ph.D. students are required to complete courses in five different areas: mathematical foundations, intermediate statistics, machine learning theory and methods, data models, and optimization. They are also required to take 15 hours of electives chosen from at least two of the following: statistics and applied probability, advanced theory, applications, computing and optimization, and platforms.
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]]>With the recent availability of new antiviral drugs, individuals with hepatitis C can achieve cure of their disease. Several organizations, including the National Academy of Medicine and the World Health Organization, are considering the possibility of hepatitis C elimination as a public health threat, but several barriers exist. These include lack of effective screening policies, exorbitant costs associated with scaling-up screening and treatment to a large portion of the population, and the rising incidence of hepatitis C, especially among young people who inject drugs.
Supported by the Directorates for Engineering and Computer and Information Science and Engineering through the Smart and Connected Health initiative, the National Science Foundation has awarded a $1.2 million grant over four years to a team of researchers to study the elimination of hepatitis C in the United States. The interdisciplinary research team is comprised of Turgay Ayer, George Family Foundation assistant professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology’s H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial & Systems Engineering; Jagpreet Chhatwal, decision scientist at Massachusetts General Hospital and assistant professor at Harvard Medical School; and Anne Spaulding, associate professor of epidemiology at Emory University’s Rollins School of Public Health and an infectious disease physician in the Department of Medicine, Emory School of Medicine.
This collaborative research aims to use innovative methods from operations research to answer policy-relevant questions that could lead to hepatitis C elimination in the United States. The research will address questions such as: How should state Medicaid programs expand hepatitis C screening and treatment under their constrained budgets; what kind of screening policy should be implemented for the general population; and how would investments in high-risk groups such as people in prisons reduce hepatitis C transmission.
The interdisciplinary team will also develop practical decision-support tools for implementation and use by the stakeholders. To facilitate implementation, the researchers will partner with the Department of Health and Human Services, state and county health departments, and prison policymakers, who are the potential stakeholders of the proposed solutions and tools.
Ultimately, this innovative project has the potential to substantially reduce HCV disease burden, eventually leading to its elimination by 2030.
“NSF is pleased to support innovative, multidisciplinary research teams as they address key national challenges, such as control over debilitating diseases like hepatitis C,” said Georgia-Ann Klutke, National Science Foundation Program Director for Operations Engineering, which funds the research. “While highly successful antiviral treatments are available, eliminating the disease requires a cost-effective allocation of resources for screening and treatment.”
“Many of the pressing healthcare problems faced today are too complicated for a single academic discipline to consider and tackle,” said Ayer. “This is an exemplary interdisciplinary collaborative research effort drawing upon the expertise from several disciplines, including mathematical modeling and data analytics, public health and policy, hepatology, and correctional health; and with the holistic and innovative perspective we take, our hope is to facilitate and improve decision-making in managing the hepatitis C epidemic worldwide.”
Describing the impact of the research, Chhatwal said, “By providing decision-support tools, we believe the proposed research can aid policymakers in making policy decisions that will bring us closer to hepatitis C elimination in the United States.”
“I have been taking care of patients with hepatitis C for two decades, in both correctional facilities and the community,” added Spaulding. “We can study how addressing hepatitis C in each setting contributes to eliminating this curable disease.”
This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grants No. 1722614, 1722665, and 1722906.
]]>“The decision is never easy,” said John Vande Vate, professor and Senior Design coordinator. “Many teams showed real brilliance in tackling very challenging problems. Congratulations to these remarkable young people, and many thanks to their advisors who helped them accomplish so much so well.”
Team Bacon ‘n’ Eggs partnered with client Waffle House to identify areas in which their maintenance handling system could be improved. The goal of the project was to help Waffle House uphold their commitment to serving customers 24/7/365 by reducing the frequency, duration, and impact of breakdowns inside units. Their work consisted of several deliverables that together can achieve this goal.
First, the team increased the preparedness of technicians in order to expedite time to service and limit breakdown duration. They accomplished this goal by: 1) reassigning technicians geographically to reduce travel time to and from units, and 2) by restructuring the maintenance van inventory model to limit the number of stockout instances upon arrival to units. These two initiatives combined will reduce the duration of breakdowns by seven percent and recapture over 30,000 productive labor hours that can be allocated to increased preventative maintenance.
Next, the team reprioritized preventative maintenance routines to ensure more frequent attention to critical appliances inside of units; this work will reduce the frequency of breakdowns by 11 percent.
Finally, the team partnered with a third-party maintenance application to pilot a digitized version of the current paper maintenance reporting system. With this application, Waffle House will be able to track the frequency and duration of breakdowns across the system to establish a maintenance culture around performance.
“We were very impressed with the high level of professionalism of the Senior Design team throughout the process,” said Louis Todd, vice president of equipment at Waffle House. “They helped us to identify process improvements in several major areas of our equipment maintenance function. These improvements will speed up our response times, shorten equipment down time, and reduce our overall maintenance spend. This team, as we like to say at Waffle House, really scattered, smothered, and covered the challenge we gave them. This was a huge homerun.”
The Bacon ‘n’ Eggs team included Roshan Balakrishnan, Melina Blasetti, Christopher Bush, Hasit Dewan, Scott Larson, Nicholas Rogstad, Rikhil Shah, and Viral Shah. They were advised by ISyE Lecturer Gamze Tokol-Goldsman.
Team Emory Quality Metrics created a trusted performance benchmarking system. This solution will allow Emory Healthcare to assess its surgeons’ performances and more easily identify parts of their system where they can add value either by improving quality of care or decreasing excess costs. The team utilized the combination of financial and qualitative data from procedures to create linear and logistic regressions that provide a reliable foundation for benchmarking that physicians can trust. These models allowed for an in-depth look at predictors for four critical procedures: colectomies, ventral hernias, carotid endarterectomies, and hepatectomies, and their effect on dozens of different response variables, including direct variable cost, readmission rates, patient length of stay (days between the procedure and discharge), and return to operating room rates.
The annual opportunity in potential cost savings identified was $1.43 million, and the opportunity for potential length of stay reductions identified was 940 staying days per year. While this information provided analytics tailored to Emory Healthcare’s patient population, the team established an effective way to communicate this information with the Emory Healthcare community of the Project Management Office (PMO), physicians, administrators, and nurse navigators.
An additional goal of the team was to provide an interface that would allow Emory Healthcare to continue to gain insights by drilling down on risk-adjusted surgeon performance, identifying opportunities for value-add by category, and showing which predictors have the greatest effect on the outcome.
Their work will be implemented into the design phase of future Value Acceleration Projects (VAPs) at Emory Healthcare that aim to improve quality and decrease costs. Next semester, this initiative will be passed off to a Georgia Tech team of masters students.
Team members on the Emory Quality Metrics project included Sarah Both, Matthew Creatore, Madeline Gaffney, Alice Jinks, Thomas Ross, Michael Senoo, Nathan Stefanick, and Brandon Wells. They were advised by Professor Renato Montiero.
Team Mercedes-Benz Stadium’s client was the new Mercedes-Benz Stadium in Atlanta, Georgia, where the NFL Atlanta Falcons and MLS Atlanta United both play. The project focused on the ways the food and beverage process affects the fan experience at the Mercedes-Benz Stadium. The team developed a standard queue design and an inventory forecasting tool, recommended signage and standard operating procedures, and conducted market research on the use of technology. Their work resulted in a 50 percent reduction in fan wait time throughout the stadium.
The Mercedes-Benz Stadium team members included Kevin Breslin, Lucy Bullen, Rohan Iyer, Valeria Rossi, Ethan Sailers, Elizabeth Swiger, and John Welch. They were also advised by Tokol-Goldsman.
Senior Design team Textron was selected as the ISyE Judges’ Choice at the Capstone Expo.
The group worked alongside Textron – an American global aerospace, defense, security, and advanced technologies industrial conglomerate – to improve the throughput of their 660 Belt-Loader production facility in Kennesaw, Georgia. The team balanced the assembly line, as well as designed a system to minimize delays caused by late parts from support stations. These measures increased the maximum throughput of the assembly line by 0.25 vehicles/day, as well as a reduction of delays due to missing parts.
Textron team members included Scott Berry, Kerui Cui, Andre Evans, Zhejin Liu, Gordon Nail, Saneel Prabhu, Ji Qi, and Conor Tanzman. They were advised by Associate Professor Santanu Dey.
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]]>For many teams, the projects were all about making people’s lives easier. From a 2-D wearable sensor that makes it simple for runners to access their smartphone, to an app that provides a more transparent automotive service experience to car owners, student teams focused their energy on creating projects tailored to the customer. Two separate teams focused on the fan at the Mercedes-Benz and Braves stadiums in Atlanta, ensuring that game watchers could access food and beverages as efficiently as possible to enhance their game day experience. Another team helped customers coming into Home Depot find the exact screw they are looking for with a device that analyzes the screw type, removing shopping frustrations.
Other teams focused on enhancing the customer experience. Luxury car brands manufactured by GM had one team designing driver’s seats with sensors to increase the safety and comfort of commuters, ultimately delivering a higher quality driving experience. Mechanical engineering team members Doug Learnard and Golda Nguyen agreed that offering a novel car experience to drivers is a value add for customers when considering their buying options, and a tailored, personalized seat offers a better commute.
At the end of the night there was a surprise in store for all competitors. For the first time in Capstone’s 10 year history, there was a tie for the overall winner. “Bacon and Eggs” and “Team 16 Emory Risk” shared the spotlight and $3,000 cash prize. Both teams were from ISyE.
“Bacon and Eggs” focused on system improvements for Waffle House to help the chain uphold their commitment to 24/7/365 quality customer service. The team optimized four areas for the restaurant, including restructuring the maintenance van inventory model, modifying geographic assignment of maintenance technicians, reprioritizing preventative maintenance procedures, and recommending a centralized maintenance management platform.
“Waffle house is one of those places where every time you go there, you can tell how much they care about their customers, and it’s really been an honor to help them out with that,” said Christopher Bush, ISyE. “All in all, winning feels like an absolutely amazing experience. Everyone talks about how hard it is for industrial teams to win Capstone, and we set out to defy that.”
For “Team 16 Emory Risk,” students focused on enabling doctors at Emory to provide better healthcare, upholding Emory’s value equation which is “Quality Over Cost.” The team combined Emory’s medical and financial data to provide physicians a way to better allocate their resources and inputs, such as medications and beds for patients.
“Our team is so excited to win, we are really honored to have worked with Emory Healthcare, which is an awesome client,” said Sarah Both, ISyE. “In fact, we had our final handoff meeting with Emory today, and they are incredibly excited and looking forward to implementing our work into their system to preserve resources and provide a better experience to patients.”
Many student teams are poised to take their projects even further after Capstone, either applying for a patent or joining the CREATE-X program to take their business idea to market. And those focusing on the consumer have a distinct advantage in today’s business world that offers high reward to companies who invest in the customer experience.
2017 Fall Capstone Design Expo Winners
Overall winner – Tie
Bacon and Eggs - Waffle House maintenance handling system improvements
Team 16 Emory Risk - Emory Healthcare Risk Modeling and Patient Quality Metrics
Alice Jinks, ISyE, Columbus, GA
Aerospace Engineering
Ostrow Air - Commuter Aircraft/Air-taxi Aircraft 2030
Biomedical Engineering
Liv'R Little - Laparoscopic Liver Maneuvering Device
Civil & Environmental Engineering
J2AD Engineering - Bridge Replacement - Lee St Over Heart of Georgia Railroad
Electrical & Computer Engineering
Brighter SoluSuns - Intelligent Triport
Industrial Design and Mechanical Engineering
Rampion - Dance Ramp Assembly Optimization Project
Industrial & Systems Engineering
12 Textron Quality - Textron Quality
Mechanical Engineering
Blankity Blank - Material Handling Revolution
Interdisciplinary
Miracle on Techwood - Lockblox
For more images visit the Flickr site.
]]>“I knew it would look good on my resume, and I think it got Delta’s attention,” Gachuz recalled in a recent conversation. “After I submitted my application, they called me back about a job two days later.”
Gachuz has been working for Delta for several weeks now as a ramp agent, which means he helps with loading and unloading baggage and cargo from the planes, as well as occasionally guiding planes into and out of gateways.
He also plans to continue with the other three LEAP courses and will complete the certification program. When asked what he learned from the first course, Gachuz said, “I didn’t know much about logistics before I started. Now I do. I also learned how to present myself, and how to use the terminology.”
The LEAP program is housed in Georgia Tech’s Supply Chain & Logistics Institute (SCL) and is supported by a $350,000 grant from JPMorgan Chase & Co. Additional funding has been provided by Schneider National, Inc. The certification is designed to attract a younger workforce and prepare them for successful careers in supply chain and logistics.
The program is currently tuition-free for 16-24 year olds in metro Atlanta counties, as well as active-duty service members. The four courses with the LEAP program are the aforementioned Supply Chain Management Principles, Warehousing Operations, Transportation Operations, and Customer Service Operations.
For more information on the LEAP program, visit https://www.scl.gatech.edu/LEAP.
To apply to the LEAP program, visit https://www.scl.gatech.edu/LEAP/apply.
]]>“Since I started at Tech, I’ve been interested in supply chain management – moving a product from the supplier all the way to the end consumer – but there is a difference between that and supply chain engineering,” said Jordan. “With supply chain management, you are operating off a system that’s already been created. With supply chain engineering, you’re creating the supply chain. And I think that is a very interesting challenge.”
It’s not just classroom learning that has Jordan thinking about supply chain management. He also uniquely applies supply chain strategy on the football field. He notes that supply chain management is all about efficiency and optimization, focusing on the quickest way to get a product from point A to point B.
“On the football field, you want the most efficient and quickest way to score a touchdown,” said Jordan. “That’s what we aim to achieve as well with supply chain management and engineering, but with products. You want to get the product as quickly as possible to the consumer.”
While Jordan says that the strategy behind the game is ultimately all up to the coach, he does rely on it when executing.
“When I execute a play, I draw on supply chain strategy,” said Jordan. “If the ball needs to go to a certain spot, at a certain time, I envision the best way to do that with the players I have around me. It’s about optimizing the field.”
After football and earning his master’s, Jordan plans on joining the workforce in a supply chain management or engineering role. The combination of a business degree in supply chain management and a master’s degree in supply chain engineering sets him up well for a career in logistics.
“With both of my degrees [Jordan has a bachelor's in business administration from Tech], I’ll have a better understanding of why supply chain management is important, and I can put it into practice with the engineering experience,” said Jordan. “I understand why it’s important to have efficient supply chain management to run a company at optimal levels. Without good supply chain management, you don’t have a viable business.”
With companies like UPS and Delta in Atlanta, Jordan might even get to stay in the city that he’s come to love and continue cheering on Georgia Tech from the side lines.
]]>College of Engineering
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“Alejandro has made valuable contributions to both the Stewart School and his field through his research related to supply chain management, logistics, and optimization,” said Edwin Romeijn, ISyE’s H. Milton and Carolyn J. Stewart School Chair. “His appointment to the Leo and Louise Benatar Early Career Professorship will enable him to further advance in his career and impact his field.”
Toriello’s research interests lie in the theory and application of supply chain management, logistics and transportation, and in related optimization methodologies.
“I'm honored to receive an early career professorship, and thank the Benatars for their generous support of the Stewart School,” said Toriello. “The Benatar professorship will be instrumental in continuing and growing my research program over the coming years.”
Toriello received both his BSIE (2003) and his Ph.D. in industrial engineering (2010) from Georgia Tech.
Prior to joining ISyE in 2013, he served as an assistant professor in the Epstein Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering at the University of Southern California.
]]>MedShare, the Medical Surplus Recovery Organization (MSRO) that served as the researchers’ site of research and analysis, by all accounts excels in its mission to “improve the quality of life of people and our planet.” Among the nation’s top-rated nonprofits, the Decatur-based MSRO bridges the gap between surplus and need by shipping excess medical supplies and equipment to developing countries. Since being founded in 1998, MedShare has delivered over $206 million of humanitarian aid and has helped over 19 million patients worldwide. In addition to the social impact of donations, the organization has saved 2.5 million pounds of excess medical items from entering landfills in the United States.
Medshare CEO Charles Redding, who received his bachelor’s degree in Chemical Engineering from Georgia Tech, has forged a number of relationships between his organization and alma mater. On a visit to Scheller College of Business Professor Atalay Atasu’s MBA class in supply chain management, Redding spoke about how MedShare does not fit the typical supply and demand model. Due to its never-ending mission to help those in need and its dependency on donations, MedShare has conceivably infinite demand and very limited supply. He told students how MedShare matched demand and supply: Recipients logged into the system to view current inventory and select those items with which to fill their shipping containers. He compared it to “shopping on Amazo
These exchanges led Professors Atasu and Beril Toktay each to write a case study focused on different facets of MedShare’s exciting supply chain model. Can Zhang, a PhD student in the Stewart School of Industrial & Systems Engineering who is broadly interested in socially responsible operations, heard about these efforts and, along with one of his advisors, George Family Foundation Assistant Professor Turgay Ayer, also became interested in studying MedShare. In studying the nonprofit’s operations, the four researchers discovered that allowing recipients to view and select from an online list of available inventory could create time-based competition in the ordering system, which resulted in recipients selecting and receiving medical items that might not meet their most pressing needs. Zhang applied game theory to the creation of models that would better match inventory and need. He determined that a “wish list” model would provide clarity in regard to recipients’ top priorities. Instead of displaying inventory from which recipients could “go shopping,” the wish list model would let recipients rank their priorities from a list of all potential items, but would hide actual inventory. MedShare would then be able to see which items from their current inventory would best supply which recipient—so they could service that need first.
Redding said MedShare always gives recipients surveys that include the question, “Were you able to use the equipment you ordered?” Most recipients usually answered “yes.” However, Redding noted, “We never asked the question, ‘Did we provide what you really wanted?’ We were forcing them to select from what was available as opposed to identifying what they really needed and having them wait until it was available.” He praised Zhang and the team of researchers in providing a more efficient model for delivering humanitarian aid that can do the most good for a community.
For his work on “Truthful Mechanisms for Medical Surplus Product Allocation,” Zhang won the 2017 POMS College of Sustainable Operations Best Student Paper Award. He is also a finalist for the 2017 INFORMS Doing Good with Good OR Student Paper Competition and the 2017 MSOM Student Paper Competition. Zhang said the project excites him because of the social welfare and humanitarian angle. He said, “I’m from a small town in China, and I have been a part of the people who received aid from others. Therefore, I feel very motivated to study a problem like this—how to help people more effectively. My hope is to build an academic career where I have social impact by working on scarce resource allocation problems in nonprofits and healthcare supply chains.”
References:
A. Atasu, B. Toktay, W.M. Yeo, C. Zhang. “Effective Medical Surplus Recovery.” Forthcoming in Production and Operations Management.
C. Zhang, A. Atasu, T. Ayer, B. Toktay. “Truthful Mechanisms for Medical Surplus Product Allocation.” Submitted.
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As the world’s largest professional association dedicated to and promoting best practices and advances in operations research, management science, and analytics to improve operational processes, decision-making, and outcomes, INFORMS reserves the Fellow Award for distinguished individuals who have demonstrated outstanding and exceptional accomplishments in operations research and the management sciences.
In the announcement of the Fellow Awards, the organization recognized Ahmed for “exceptional contributions to stochastic and discrete optimization, dedicated service to the optimization community, and outstanding mentorship of future scholars.”
INFORMS commended Romeijn for “outstanding contributions in research to optimization, supply chain management, and healthcare, education, academic leadership, and service to INFORMS and the profession.”
About Shabbir Ahmed
Ahmed said, “I am very honored to be part of the distinguished scholars and practitioners selected as INFORMS Fellows this year. My sincere thanks to the colleagues who nominated me and the selection committee. I am particularly happy to share this honor with three other researchers in my area of stochastic optimization and, of course, with my ISyE colleague Edwin.”
Anderson-Interface Chair and Professor in ISyE Ahmed is interested in developing methods for large-scale optimization problems and their applications in energy and other networked systems. His research in these areas has been supported by federal agencies such as the Advanced Research Program Agency - Energy (ARPA-E), the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, the National Science Foundation, and the Office of Naval Research; as well as by industrial organizations such as ExxonMobil, IBM, and Samsung.
Ahmed has served as the chair of the Stochastic Programming Society (2007-2010), and as a vice-chair (Stochastic Programming) of the INFORMS Optimization Society (2006-2008). His honors include the National Science Foundation CAREER award, two IBM Faculty Awards, the Coca-Cola Junior Professorship from ISyE, and the INFORMS Dantzig Dissertation award. He is an associate editor for Mathematical Programming, Operations Research, and Operations Research Letters, and was an area editor for Surveys in Operations Research and Management Science and a department editor for IISE Transactions (Operations Engineering and Analysis).
He received his M.S. and Ph.D. from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1997 and 2000, respectively.
About Edwin Romeijn
“It is a great honor to be recognized by the Institute of Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS) with the 2017 Fellow Award,” said Romeijn. “Together with my colleague Shabbir Ahmed, we join the ranks of many distinguished individuals who also have been recognized for their contributions to operations research and management sciences.
As the Stewart School Chair, Romeijn is responsible for overseeing ISyE as the nation’s largest industrial engineering program.
His areas of expertise include optimization theory and applications. His recent research activities deal with issues arising in radiation therapy treatment planning and supply chain management. In radiation therapy treatment planning, his main goal has been to develop new models and algorithms for efficiently determining effective treatment plans for cancer patients who are treated using radiation therapy, and treatment schedules for radiation therapy clinics. In supply chain optimization, his main interests are in the integrated optimization of production, inventory, and transportation processes, in particular in the presence of demand flexibility, limited resources, perishability, and uncertainty.
Romeijn is currently an associate editor of IISE Transactions. He is a member of INFORMS, Mathematical Optimization Society (MOS), Society of Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM), and the American Association of Physicists in Medicine (AAPM). In April 2017, he was recognized by the Institute of Industrial and Systems Engineers (IISE) with the 2017 IISE Fellow Award, which recognizes outstanding leaders of the profession who have made significant, nationally recognized contributions to industrial engineering.
Romeijn received his M.S. in econometrics and Ph.D. in operations research from Erasmus University Rotterdam in the Netherlands in 1988 and 1992, respectively.
]]>The NMMB is the principal forum at the U.S. National Academies for all national issues related to innovative materials and advanced manufacturing, and has oversight responsibility for National Research Council activities in these technology areas.
The NMMB was created in recognition of the increasing importance of materials science to innovations in engineering and manufacturing. The NMMB combines the charges of two preexisting boards: the National Materials Advisory Board and the Board on Manufacturing and Engineering Design. Its mission is to build on the past achievements of its parent boards by providing objective, independent assessments of the current state of materials and manufacturing research - including at the atomic, molecular, and nano scales - and the applications of new and existing materials in innovative ways, including pilot-scale and large-scale manufacturing, the design of new devices, and disposal.
Previous studies by NMMB have covered diverse, timely, and consequential topics including global supply chains and national security, real-time detection of damage to materials in aerospace applications and of threat agents, integrated computational materials engineering, and management of existing U.S. materials resources. Under the sponsorship of U.S. government agencies such as the Department of Commerce, Department of Defense, the Department of Energy, Department of Transportation, and the National Science Foundation, NMMB will be responsible for the strategic planning, program development, and administrative oversight of studies and other activities that expand this existing body of work.
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GTMI
]]>The negative effect of emergencies is disproportionally high on low income or vulnerable populations, complicating ongoing needs in health, nutrition, education, and other key areas. Whether an emergency or a long term development challenge, there are often many actors, limited resources, variability and uncertainly, and potential disruptions in the demand and supply chains. All of these factors highlight the importance of logistics and supply chain management in these contexts.
In light of these grand challenges, the annual Conference on Health & Humanitarian Logistics provides an open forum to discuss new solutions in health systems, disaster preparedness and response, and long-term development. Co-organized by the Center for Health and Humanitarian Systems (CHHS) at Georgia Institute of Technology, INSEAD, MIT Humanitarian Response Lab, and Northeastern University, the conference offers a unique platform for participants to discuss challenges, share best practices, and explore potential collaborations, with the goal of enhancing efficiency and effectiveness in health and humanitarian systems, and ultimately improving and saving lives around the world.
2017 marked the 9th year of the conference, which took place during June 7-9, in Copenhagen, Denmark at the UN City, hosted and co-organized by the UNICEF Supply Division. The event drew over 200 attendees from 39 countries and 127 organizations, including non-governmental organizations and UN agencies as well as government, industry, foundations, and academia.
The agenda featured 3 plenary panel sessions and 53 break-out presentation and workshop sessions led by practitioners and thought leaders on current challenges and solutions in health and humanitarian logistics. 31 posters were presented, providing a platform for networking and discussions around new tools and implementations.
Dr. Richard Brennan, Director of Emergency Operations for the World Health Organization (WHO) Emergencies Programme division, delivered the opening keynote, and addressed the role of logistics in health and humanitarian response and the importance of global, national and local capacity building, cross-sector collaboration and partnerships, and performance measurement. Brennan led the Ebola Response as the Director at the WHO headquarters from October 2014 to January 2016 and now oversees the organization’s response to global health emergencies as part of the new Emergencies Programme, from preparedness and prevention to response, and from humanitarian emergencies to disease outbreaks.
Plenary panel sessions included presentations focused on: 1) Global Health Emergencies; 2) Innovation and Influencing Markets; and 3) Ensuring Sustainability of Supply Chain Systems Strengthening Interventions. Keynote and plenary presentations are available on the conference website: chhs.gatech.edu/conference/2017/program/panels.
Participants were active on Twitter (#2017HHLConf) throughout the event, sharing points and reflections, reacting to the presentations and workshops. Participants also commented that the conference was “very educational and allowed for great networking among participants” and “the workshops were well-organized, insightful, and very informative.”
The conference could not have been possible without the generous sponsorship from key partners such as the UPS Foundation, the premiere sponsor for the 9th year, Imperial Health Sciences, Johnson & Johnson, the William David Institute at the University of Michigan, and the Partnership for Supply Chain Management.
]]>Stewart School of Industrial & Systems Engineering
404.385.3102
]]>“We are proud that the Stewart School continues to be recognized as the top program of its kind. ISyE remains at the forefront of the field as a result of the hard work and commitment of our preeminent faculty, remarkable students, dedicated staff, and engaged alumni,” said Edwin Romeijn, ISyE’s H. Milton and Carolyn J. Stewart School Chair.
Georgia Tech’s College of Engineering again ranked No. 7 overall, No. 3 among public universities, and all 11 of the programs within the college are ranked in the top 10.
]]>Efforts to launch the theory-focused institute were supported by the Institute for Data Engineering and Science (IDEaS) with faculty from the Colleges of Engineering, Sciences and Computing. Xiaoming Huo, principal investigator and professor in the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial & Systems Engineering (ISyE), will serve as the executive director of TRIAD. “The establishment of TRIAD is tremendously beneficial considering data science is a phenomenon that brings with it so many opportunities. There is a lot of research that needs to be conducted in this emerging field, and we will focus on building the theoretical foundations to establish the principles of data science,” said Huo.
“With the launch of TRIAD and the already well-established NSF South Big Data Innovation Hub, Georgia Tech plays a key role nationally in data science from theory to applications to building community partnerships,” said Srinivas Aluru, co-executive director of IDEaS and a professor in the School of Computational Science and Engineering.
Dana Randall, fellow co-executive director and professor in the School of Computer Science, said, “Advances in data science foundations can lead to revolutionary new solutions for analyzing data. TRIAD will accelerate this research by bridging fields to expand our collective capabilities.”
Both Aluru and Randall serve as co-principal investigators of TRIAD, along with Prasad Tetali, a professor in the School of Mathematics and School of Computer Science, and Jeff Wu, the Coca-Cola Chair in Engineering Statistics and a professor in ISyE. “The emphasis on theoretical foundations (of data science) offers a great opportunity for mathematicians to actively engage with other scientists and help make breakthroughs in this fast growing interdisciplinary field," said Tetali.
The analysis of massive, dynamic, noisy and complex data arising in virtually every sphere of human activity is a pressing problem of our time. NSF is responding by dedicating $17.7 million in funding for 12 Transdisciplinary Research in Principles of Data Science (TRIPODS) institutes, including TRIAD. Encompassing 14 institutions in 11 states, these projects will promote long-term research and training activities in data science that transcend disciplinary boundaries.
“Data is accelerating the pace of scientific discovery and innovation,” said Jim Kurose, NSF assistant director for Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE). “These new TRIPODS projects will help build the theoretical foundations of data science that will enable continued data-driven discovery and breakthroughs across all fields of science and engineering.”
According to NSF, the TRIPODS awards will enable data-driven discovery through major investments in state-of-the-art mathematical and statistical tools, better data mining and machine learning approaches, enhanced visualization capabilities and more. They also support innovative educational pathways to train the next generation of data scientists.
TRIAD will bring together senior, mid-career and junior faculty members, postdoctoral fellows, graduate and undergraduate students and data science practitioners at large using focused working groups, national and international workshops and organized innovation labs. It will build an intellectual atmosphere to connect stakeholders from across the nation and the world on a regular basis.
Initially, TRIAD will focus on four research topics: advanced mathematical modeling for contemporary data; new inferential strategies that can be both scalable and de-centralized; efficient optimization tools with theoretical guarantees; and applications in the context of large datasets from domains including biology, design, manufacturing, logistics and sustainability.
TRIAD will launch with 39 committed faculty members from across Georgia Tech, including from ISyE, the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering, the School of Mathematics, the School of Biological Sciences, the School of Computational Science and Engineering and the School of Computer Science.
NSF’s award establishes TRIAD as a Phase I investment. It may be subsequently expanded to Phase II through a second competitive proposal process.
]]>Director of Communications and Grant Writing, Institute for Data Engineering and Science
]]>“Since Yao joined the Stewart School four years ago, she has made significant contributions to ISyE and her field,” said Edwin Romeijn, H. Milton and Carolyn J. Stewart School Chair and Professor in ISyE. “Her appointment as the Harold R. and Mary Anne Nash Early Career Professor recognizes her impressive research in big data analytics, signal/information processing, and machine learning, and will enable her to continue advancing in her career.”
Xie’s new appointment will allow her to further pursue her research in sequential statistical methods, statistical signal processing, big data analysis, compressed sensing, and optimization. Her work has applications to wireless communications, sensor networks, as well as medical and astronomical imaging.
"I am incredibly excited and honored to receive the Harold R. and Mary Anne Nash Early Career Professorship and extremely grateful for the generous gift from the Nash family,” Xie said. “The award not only provides support to further my research in building useful statistical methods and machine-learning algorithms, but it also comes as a welcome recognition from ISyE.”
Before coming to ISyE in 2013, Xie served as a research scientist in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at Duke University after receiving her Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University in 2011.
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]]>Deloitte Consulting LLP (“Deloitte Consulting”) and a group of Atlanta area corporations helped launch the initiative. The study is the first phase of #SupplyChainCity, and its purpose is to baseline the current state of the region’s supply chain capabilities and guide Metro Atlanta toward a leading role in the next generation of industry.
The study evaluated four key metrics across seven of the largest metropolitan statistical areas (MSAs) in the United States known for their supply chain capabilities: New York–New Jersey, Atlanta, Chicago, San Francisco Bay Area, Dallas, Los Angeles, and Seattle.
Access a PDF version of the report within the Metro Atlanta Chamber website.
]]>Led by the Georgia Institute of Technology, the NSF Engineering Research Center for Cell Manufacturing Technologies (CMaT) could help revolutionize the treatment of cancer, heart disease, autoimmune diseases and other disorders by enabling broad use of potentially curative therapies that utilize living cells – such as immune cells and stem cells – as “drugs.” Examples of these highly promising therapies include T cell-based immunotherapies for blood cancers, such as the one developed at the University of Pennsylvania and approved in August by the U.S. Food & Drug Administration, and a gene-modified stem cell therapy recently approved in Europe for a form of the so-called “bubble boy” syndrome.
To facilitate the widespread application of these cutting-edge emerging treatments, CMaT will develop robust and scalable technologies, innovative analytical tools, and engineering systems that will enable industry and clinical facilities to reproducibly manufacture efficient, safe and affordable cell-therapy products. The center, one of four ERCs announced September 12 by the NSF, will also develop improved models for a robust supply chain, storage and distribution system for these therapeutic cell products.
Ben Wang, Gwaltney Chair in Manufacturing Systems and executive director of the Georgia Tech Manufacturing Institute, and Chip White, Schneider National Chair in Transportation and Logistics, are Stewart School of Industrial & Systems Engineering (ISyE) faculty members who are involved with CMaT. Wang and White’s research will focus on developing approaches that will enable the manufacture, storage, and distribution of these cell products, continuing their research already underway that is supported by the Marcus Foundation. Other ISyE faculty members may become involved with CMaT in the future.
“For over 30 years, NSF Engineering Research Centers have promoted innovation, helped to maintain our competitive edge, and added billions of dollars to the U.S. economy,” said NSF Director France Córdova. “They bring together talented innovators and entrepreneurs with resources from academia, industry and government to produce engineers and engineering systems that solve real-world problems. I am confident that these new ERCs will strengthen U.S. competitiveness for the next generation and continue our legacy of improving the quality of life for all Americans.”
In addition to the consistent manufacture of cell-based therapies, the public-private CMaT initiative will also help develop a skilled, diverse and inclusive bio-manufacturing workforce through extensive education and training activities at the K-12, technical college, undergraduate, graduate, and postdoctoral levels.
Living cells become “drugs”
“Unlike pharmaceuticals and other products now used in medical treatments, cells are living entities whose properties can significantly change depending on nuances in the way they are grown, stored or otherwise manipulated,” said Krishnendu Roy, director of CMaT and the Robert A. Milton chair professor in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University. “The center will develop new engineering tools and scalable methods to better characterize, expand, differentiate, separate, transport and store high-quality cells so they provide consistent therapeutic effects, allowing them to be used in standardized therapies by clinicians to serve large numbers of patients worldwide.”
Beyond Georgia Tech, the center will include major partners – the University of Georgia, the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the University of Puerto Rico, Mayaguez Campus – as well as affiliate partners such as the University of Pennsylvania, Emory University, the Gladstone Institutes, and Michigan Technological University. Additional international academic partners, as well as industry and the U.S. national laboratories, will also be critical collaborators in the effort.
Moving discoveries into application
“Georgia Tech has a long history of building collaborative partnerships with industry, the national labs and other research universities. With the support of the NSF and this new ERC, we will be able to capitalize on expertise in multiple areas, taking transformative research from the laboratory to practice much more quickly,” said Georgia Tech President G. P. “Bud” Peterson. “The Center for Cell Manufacturing Technologies will also help us educate, train and prepare the workforce in a new industry, thereby continuing to strengthen the U.S. economy.”
Clinical trials have already established the effectiveness of several cell-based therapies and many other trials are underway. But for these exciting therapies to advance into broad healthcare use, the cells will have to be produced in much larger quantities and with more consistent quality than is now available. There are also very few, if any, established industry standards for analytics and processes in cell manufacturing, which hinders consistent production of safe and efficacious cells. Another key limitation identified by industry is the need for a highly-trained workforce.
CMaT would address these barriers through transformative innovations that build upon a series of earlier efforts, including the National Cell Manufacturing Consortium (NCMC) roadmap, infrastructure established at Georgia Tech with support from the Marcus Foundation, quality and other standards programs from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and independent industry-led bodies, and translational activities by industry, entrepreneurs and other partners.
The NSF’s multidisciplinary engineering research centers address unique, complex engineering challenges by stimulating knowledge and tech transfer between different sectors, from electronics to energy to infrastructure. Each center takes on a specific engineering research challenge.
“The overall goal of the NSF Engineering Research Centers program is nothing less than to revolutionize engineering research and education in the United States,” said Dawn Tilbury, NSF assistant director for engineering. “We look forward to the exciting advances and outcomes in these important areas.”
Accelerating clinical trials
Beyond established cell-based therapies, the work of CMaT should accelerate the development of new therapies and the testing needed to bring them into the clinic, said Steven Stice, director of the University of Georgia’s Regenerative Bioscience Center (RBC). Regenerative medicine applications could offer new ways of treating diseases for which there are now essentially no treatments, including Parkinson's, Alzheimer’s, heart disease and stroke.
“There are a significant number of cell therapy clinical trials and investments in the field,” Stice said. “But there is little or no investment in a set of consistent standardization methods to optimize how these therapies should work. For instance, we know that cell therapies will improve human health, but right now it’s difficult to guarantee that each dose produced will be as potent as the next. The work done by CMaT researchers will help solve some of these problems.”
The University of Pennsylvania develops cellular therapies and has conducted more than 40 clinical trials of cell-based therapies, including those for engineered T cell therapies and chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T cells. An example is recently-approved treatment for relapsed and refractory acute lymphoblastic leukemia in pediatric and young adult patients.
“The cell and gene therapy fields are on the cusp of multiple regulatory approvals in the near term,” said Bruce Levine, Barbara and Edward Netter Professor in Cancer Gene Therapy in the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. “The challenges ahead lie in developing manufacturing and testing processes incorporating automation that can bring costs down and allow access to more patients.”
Developing broad-based innovations
Critical innovations often occur at the boundaries of disciplines, and CMaT will bring together relevant specialties for both research and workforce development, noted Madeline Torres-Lugo, a professor in the Department of Chemical Engineering at the University of Puerto Rico, Mayaguez Campus.
“Due to the complexity of cells as living organisms, a team with a strong background in biology, chemistry, physics, materials science, and engineering is required for this initiative,” Torres-Lugo said. “Our participation and contribution to CMaT will ensure that Puerto Rico not only remains at the forefront of pharma manufacturing, but also supports cell manufacturing technologies here and around the world by educating highly talented engineering students.”
CMaT testbeds have been selected to address several cell types that are in early stages of clinical adoption or moving toward clinical applications, but it isn't yet clear what cell types will have the greatest therapeutic impacts, noted Sean Palecek, the Milton J. and A. Maude Shoemaker Professor in chemical and biological engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Therefore, one of the center’s challenges will be to ensure that fundamental discoveries, and tool and technology development efforts, will apply to multiple cell types.
“Our work will provide safer and more potent cell products that will allow clinical studies to establish the effectiveness of these cells as therapeutics,” Palecek said. “In addition, our work on scaling cell production will enable manufacturing of sufficient numbers of cells to replace damaged organs, such as the loss of heart muscle after a heart attack, at a cost that makes these therapies accessible to broad segments of society. We will also train the future leaders of the emerging therapeutic cell manufacturing industry. These students and their work establishing this industry will be the most significant impact of CMaT.”
New centers among 19 ERCs
Since the program’s inception in 1985, NSF has funded a total of 74 ERCs and will support 19 in this fiscal year, including four new centers. Each center receives NSF funding for up to 10 years. During this time, centers build partnerships with industry, universities and other government agencies that will sustain them for years to come.
In May, the National Academies published a report, “A new vision for center-based engineering research,” which was the result of an NSF-funded study to examine the future of the NSF ERC program.
The report identifies and recommends strategies to enable NSF multidisciplinary engineering research centers to continue addressing key research, education and innovation needs of the United States in a changing global context.
“ERCs are widely known as outstanding examples of successful partnerships between universities, private industry and government that have made significant contributions to address national challenges,” said Don Millard, acting division director for the NSF Division of Engineering Education and Centers. “We are continually working with the scientific and engineering communities, as well as private industry and government partners, to ensure NSF-funded centers and grantees are best-equipped to match societal needs with research abilities.”
]]>404.894.6986
]]>The program committee was comprised of Professors Benoit Montreuil and Martin Savelsbergh of Georgia Tech, Professor Iris Vis of the University of Groningen (and representing DINALOG), and SCL’s managing director, Tim Brown.
“This is just one more way Georgia Tech fosters a global ecosystem of academic, industry, and government partners focused on next generation research and education,” Brown said. “Together, we can continue to build on the port’s successes and continue to bring the world to Savannah.”
The 2017 cohort represented corporate, government, and nongovernmental organizations such as the Carter Center, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), the Gambian Red Cross, Médecins Sans Frontières/Doctors Without Borders (MSF), Task Force for Global Health, UNICEF, U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) Office of Food for Peace, United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), and local ministries of health in African countries.
The certificate program consists of three courses (2 days each): Pre-planning Strategy for Health and Humanitarian Organizations, Tactical Decision Making in Public Health and Humanitarian Response, and Systems Operations in Health and Humanitarian Response. Topics include distribution network design, strategies for managing inventory and uncertainty, resource allocation, and systems dynamics related to a broad range of activities including preparing, responding to, and recovery from disasters and health emergencies, as well as ongoing efforts in strengthening and managing health systems.
2017 participants had high praise for the HHSCM program, highlighting the importance and relevance of the practical applications studied in the course and how they plan to incorporate the new skills and knowledge in their current and future work. Bonaventure Mulama, Advisor, Humanitarian Programme Design & Management in Kenya remarked: “The training provided me with frameworks and tools to aid decision making at a more strategic level. One more benefit is that I met new people thus improving my professional network in quantity and quality.” Likewise, Mohammed Visram, Pharmacist for the Kagera Regional Health Management Team (RHMT) in Tanzania commented: “The participants have had very comprehensive and diverse knowledge and experience in their field and hence we could share the best practices.”
Others shared objectives for future applications of their learnings in the course. Yves Lucien Hakorimana, Tropical Health specialist at the UN Population Fund (UNFPA) in Senegal commented: “As Reproductive Health commodities expert who works in most humanitarian crisis countries, I understood more how I need to use mathematical modeling in supply chain analysis and design and address easily right recommendations for decision making.” Andrew Auruku, Logistics Officer for the Serere District Local Government in Uganda noted: “After attending the training, I will be able to tailor correct forecasting and allocations very scarce resources to target beneficiaries in my context.”
10 scholarships were awarded to HHSCM program applicants representing 7 countries. Scholarship support comes from benefactors including the UPS Foundation, Pete Quinones, and Richard “Rick” Zalesky Jr. (CE 1978) and Charlene Zalesky (HS 1977). The courses are led by CHHS co-directors Pinar Keskinocak, ISyE William W. George Chair, and Julie Swann, ISyE Harold R. and Mary Anne Nash Professor. Guest instructors include former CHHS co-director Özlem Ergun, associate professor at Northeastern University, Sheereen Brown from the Task Force for Global Health, John Bartholdi, The Manhattan Associates/Dabbiere Chair in the School of Industrial and Systems Engineering at Georgia Tech and Co-Executive Director of the Georgia Tech Logistics Innovation & Research Center in Panama, and Paulo Gonçalves, professor at University of Lugano.
For further information on the Certificate in Health & Humanitarian Supply Chain Management, please visit: https://chhs.gatech.edu/professional-education.
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]]>Cheung enrolled in LEAP and – in addition to completing all four courses that compose the program – went on to earn national certifications in supply chain management, customer service operation, transportation operation, and warehousing operations. Perhaps the most important takeaway from the LEAP program was what Cheung learned about manufacturing, but warehousing and transportation were also key.
As he pointed out, “Without being able to move and store products, manufacturing doesn’t help anyone. The main pieces are really in transportation and warehousing, because this gets products to the consumer.”
Thanks to the LEAP program and his national certifications, Cheung attained a job with Ceva Logistics, working as an operations clerk on the company’s contract with Daimler Trucks North America.
“Ceva is hired out by Daimler to do their ‘milk runs’ – their daily routes,” explained Cheung. “We deliver truck parts to all their dealers in the Southeast region.”
Cheung values his current position with Ceva, saying that when he interviewed for the role, his now-supervisor asked, “Why do you want to be a clerk, when you have this [LEAP] certification from Georgia Tech?”
“My answer was that I needed experience, because logistics are ever-changing,” Cheung said. “Logistics won’t be the same in 30 years, much less 10 years. It changes on the dime – it’s never the same, and if it is, something is wrong.” Currently, he schedules trips for drivers and tracks both their hours of service and bills of lading.
Cheung plans to further build on his LEAP education. While working at Ceva, he is also enrolled at the Florida Institute of Technology, working online toward a bachelor’s of business administration degree. After he completes his undergraduate degree, he plans to get his master’s degree in supply chain engineering.
In addition, he has remained involved with LEAP at his high school alma mater by encouraging students to enroll in LEAP and mentoring them once they do. Cheung makes himself available both by email and by text, helping the students work through questions that arise on the class discussion boards. He periodically stops in at the school and meets with the students in person.
When asked what makes him so passionate about LEAP, Cheung has a ready answer: “[On a practical level], logistics is a good industry to be in; it’s recession-proof. Regardless of the economy you’re in, you still need to get goods from one place to another. Plus, the industry always needs more people to do the work.”
“It was a great experience,” he added.
The LEAP program is housed in Georgia Tech’s Supply Chain & Logistics Institute (SCL) and is supported by a $350,000 grant from JPMorgan Chase & Co. Additional funding has been provided by Schneider National, Inc. The certification is designed to attract a younger workforce and prepare them for successful careers in supply chain and logistics.
]]>“I am honored to be appointed as the Anderson-Interface Chair and to be positioned to play a role in continuing Ray C. Anderson's rich legacy of promoting environmental sustainability,” said Ahmed. “I am very grateful for the generous support from the Anderson family, the Ray C. Anderson Foundation, and Interface, Inc., as it will enhance my work on optimization under risk and uncertainty, and its applications in reliable and efficient operations of renewable power systems.”
The Anderson-Interface Chair was created to support an eminent teacher-scholar in a position of academic leadership in the field of sustainability, energy, climate, and natural systems.
“Over the years, Shabbir's research activities have made significant impacts on the Stewart School and his field,” said Edwin Romeijn, ISyE’s H. Milton and Carolyn J. Stewart School Chair. “This well-deserved appointment as Anderson-Interface Chair will provide him with opportunities to enhance his position as a leader in the societally important area of energy systems.”
Ahmed’s research interests are in developing methods for large-scale optimization problems and their applications in energy and other networked systems. His research in these areas has been supported by federal agencies such as the Advanced Research Program Agency - Energy (ARPA-E), the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, the National Science Foundation, and the Office of Naval Research; as well as by industrial organizations such as ExxonMobil, IBM, and Samsung.
Ahmed has served as the chair of the Stochastic Programming Society (2007-2010), and as a vice-chair (Stochastic Programming) of the INFORMS Optimization Society (2006-2008). His honors include the National Science Foundation CAREER award, two IBM Faculty Awards, the Coca-Cola Junior Professorship from ISyE, and the INFORMS Dantzig Dissertation award. He is an associate editor for Mathematical Programming, Operations Research, and Operations Research Letters, and was an area editor for Surveys in Operations Research and Management Science and a department editor for IISE Transactions (Operations Engineering and Analysis).
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]]>“I am pleased to congratulate Xiaoming on his selection as an ASA Fellow,” said Edwin Romeijn, ISyE’s H. Milton and Carolyn J. Stewart School Chair. “This well-deserved recognition reflects his many significant contributions over the years to both the field of statistical science and the Stewart School.”
Fellows will be officially recognized at an awards ceremony on August 1, 2017, during the Joint Statistical Meetings in Baltimore, Maryland.
About Xiaoming Huo
Huo's research interests include statistical theory, statistical computing, and issues related to data analytics. He has made numerous contributions on topics such as sparse representation, wavelets, and statistical problems in detectability. Huo’s papers have appeared in top journals, and some of them are highly cited. He has been a senior member of IEEE since May 2004, and he was selected as a fellow of IPAM in September 2004. He won the Georgia Tech Sigma Xi Young Faculty Award in 2005. His work has led to an interview by Emerging Research Fronts in June 2006 in the field of mathematics.
Huo received a B.S. in mathematics from China’s University of Science and Technology in 1993, and an M.S. degree in electrical engineering and a Ph.D. in statistics from Stanford University, in 1997 and 1999, respectively. He joined ISyE in 1999.
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]]>To find a way to alleviate this problem, DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency), an agency of the U.S. Department of Defense, is hosting the second Spectrum Collaboration Challenge, or SC2. The goal of the challenge is to increase the possibility of access to Wi-Fi for both military and civilian wireless devices. According to the SC2 website, this will be accomplished when “radio networks will autonomously collaborate and reason about how to share the RF spectrum, avoiding interference, and jointly exploiting opportunities to achieve the most efficient use of the available spectrum.” The challenge is designed to encourage sharing between networks through a combination of machine learning and communications engineering.
Enter Georgia Tech Agile Communication Architectures, one of 30 teams selected to participate in SC2. Spearheaded by two Georgia Tech professors – Matthieu Bloch, an associate professor in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE), and Sebastian Pokutta, David M. McKenney Family Associate Professor in the Stewart School of Industrial & Systems Engineering (ISyE) – the team comprises graduate students from both schools and comes out of the interdisciplinary Center for Machine Learning at Georgia Tech (ML@GT). The team is self-funded, but Bloch and Pokutta have received some support from the National Science Foundation in the form of an EAGER grant in the amount of $99,877, which will support the team’s early efforts.
Describing the Georgia Tech team’s approach to the spectrum challenge, Bloch said, “Here at Tech, we have expertise in both communications engineering and machine learning, and [the solution] that DARPA is looking for is something that integrates the two. The future of communication – for them – has to go through the integration of machine learning and intelligence, and that was a strength we were able to advertise to DARPA. They were happy with our approach because we were proposing an integrated solution from the beginning.”
In terms of solving the challenge through machine learning, Pokutta said, “If you look at machine learning in general, it’s a very powerful technique. At the same time, it’s probably overhyped. You have to create tangible value: applying it to real-world problems and solving them to have impact. It’s like having a hammer. A hammer is a great tool, but if you have nothing to apply it to, it’s completely worthless.”
In other words, the goal of the challenge is collaboration. Collaboration is important for solving SC2, but for Bloch and Pokutta, the collaborative aspect includes training graduate students to be interdisciplinary – to understand not only the nuances of machine learning or communications engineering, but to be fluent in both fields.
There’s something else that sets the Georgia Tech team apart: While Bloch and Pokutta are the professors heading up the challenge – Pokutta compared Bloch and himself to investors in a startup company – the day-to-day work of solving the challenge is led by graduate students in ECE and ISyE.
Jana Boerger is an ISyE master’s student who will graduate this summer before entering the ISyE Ph.D. program in machine learning in fall 2017. She oversees management of the project. From an ISyE perspective, Boerger said, “The challenge shows that the optimization methods we learn in ISyE can be applied to very technical real-world problems.”
But like Pokutta and Bloch, Boerger sees the value of an interdisciplinary approach. She added, “What’s also interesting is that while our team is all students, the other teams in SC2 are companies – heavyweight teams with a lot of money behind them. I think we as students can be successful if we work together, because we have this interdisciplinary team. Innovation happens when you combine two different fields together, like we’re doing. You need to look outside the box and see what’s there and take the tools and the knowledge and combine what you have.”
Pokutta elaborated, “The challenge is a learning experience that encourages creativity. We don’t just want to take something that’s out there and enhance it. Our strategy is to break with the current paradigms, start in the physical area, and redo everything from scratch with collaboration and spectrum-sharing built in from the start, not just as an afterthought to the technology.”
Keerthi Suria Kumar Arumugam is a Ph.D. student in ECE, and he is the communications team leader. Arumugam’s team builds the interface between the hardware components and designs the signal processing algorithms to push meaningful data to machine-learning algorithms.
He explained, “We make sure we can receive signals from the network, process them, receive insights from machine-learning algorithms, and suitably schedule packets that they can then be pushed to the network.”
Over the course of the DARPA Spectrum Collaboration Challenge, the 30 teams will compete in three preliminary competitions – in December of 2017, 2018, and 2019 – with a final competition in 2020, taking place in the recently constructed DARPA Colosseum. The teams have a chance to win as much as $3.5 million in prize money.
The Colosseum, as described by the DARPA SC2 website, is located in a 30-foot by 20-foot server room on the campus of the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Maryland. It is “capable of creating a much larger, and critically important wireless world. If all goes as planned during SC2, competitors … will use the Colosseum … as a world-unique testbed to create radically new paradigms for using and managing access to the electromagnetic spectrum in both military and civilian domains.”
Bloch explained the idea behind holding SC2 in the Colosseum in terms of bringing together a group of people speaking multiple foreign languages in one room: “What DARPA wants is to put people in the room who aren’t speaking the same language. You have no information on what language the others speak. If I speak French and someone else speaks Chinese, there’s little chance that we understand each other. But the key thing – and this is where machine learning kicks in – is that we don’t have to fully understand each other. Maybe we just need to understand high-level features and communicate high-level ideas.”
Pokutta added, “If there are several people in the room, you need to understand when there is a pause in the others’ speaking so you can use that available time to speak for yourself. You don’t need to understand what’s being said; you need to understand when the language is creating gaps or holes you can use for your own communication.”
In the meantime, prior to the preliminary challenges, the Georgia Tech team will compete in “scrimmages,” or informal competitions against several other participating teams that take place in the Colosseum. The scrimmages will provide opportunities for the team to run trials using their own radio networks and to test their algorithms against one another.
Arumugam said, “The scrimmage is an excellent reality check on where we stand with respect to other teams. It is also a great opportunity to experiment with certain features and check how they fare against the other teams. Since the scrimmages are not counted toward the final score, they are essentially rehearsals. We are preparing the first draft of our design to compete against two other teams on June 21.”
Thanks to the interdisciplinary nature and approach of the Georgia Tech Agile Communication Architectures team, the group is uniquely positioned for success in developing and executing an integrated solution to the DARPA Spectrum Collaboration Challenge as it navigates the multi-year, multi-phased competition.
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]]>The students kicked off their study with focused time from Georgia Tech ISyE department heads in key areas including: Transportation and Port Logistics, the Physical Internet, Global Logistics, Health and Humanitarian Services, and they also visited several IRIM robotics labs. The students then visited a stellar lineup of companies with their leadership in Georgia including Coca-Cola, UPS, Delta, Porsche, Americold, and The Home Depot. They also spent time at the Port of Savannah with leadership from the Georgia Ports Authority, including a tour of the operations which recently received the largest container ship to-date. The students participated in the annual Georgia Logistics Summit, and further learned about supply chain successes and logistics innovations, along with 1,400 fellow logistics professionals!
From Professor Mac Cawley, “On behalf of the Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Chile, we thank the Georgia Institute of Technology – Supply Chain & Logistics Institute(SCL) for hosting our graduate students during their recent visit in May. It was a great program for our Chilean group. The students gained many insights on U.S. practices and culture. The students really enjoyed their time in Atlanta and Savannah and valued the visits to the companies. They were impressed by the presentations, the company tours, the Q&A, and the passion for each organization mission. They enjoyed the welcoming hospitality throughout the visit. It was an excellent opportunity to share and to develop talent. The trip was a complete success. We look forward to next year’s trip!”
From Georgia Tech SCL’s Managing Director, Tim Brown, “We are pleased to be able to host our colleagues and students from Chile and have them interact with our our international student base in the Masters in Supply Chain Engineering program. Several of the visiting students have decided to join us in the program. We are grateful to our alumni and corporate partners who have been generous with their time and resources in engaging with the visitors. The program is a terrific showcase of Tech’s unique supply chain ecosystem. We look forward to engaging with the next cohort.”
]]>Ozkaya’s experience with supply chain management (SCM) is deep and wide-ranging, including a stint at the UN World Food Programme as a supply chain expert advisor, and as a current advisor for the Center for Health & Humanitarian Systems, an Interdisciplinary Research Center at Georgia Tech.
In this interview, Ozkaya discusses his passion for and interest in supply chains, his motivation for starting SCW, and the future of supply chain management.
Beginning with your college education to your current company, Supply Chain Wizard, you have been deeply involved in supply chain management. What makes you so passionate about supply chains, and why?
Supply chain management is an intriguing field in every possible way. The more I learn about it, the more I love it.
First and foremost, it is an area that connects everything globally: people, products/services, countries, information, and of course, the money. SCM is like the operating system of the world.
The second reason for my passion is that SCM is complex, and it requires a significant amount of problem solving and analytical skills. This is a prime field for applying engineering skills combined with people and technology skills to solve real complicated business issues.
Finally, I love the integrated nature of SCM and its impact on actual business results such as revenues, margins, and customer happiness. As a “supply chain wizard,” I enjoy this final aspect the most — aligning and integrating all business functions so that companies reach their maximum potential.
You’ve worked in various supply chain-related roles, from NGOs like the UN World Food Programme to major companies such as McKinsey. What have your broad range of experiences enabled you to bring to your own company?
I have worked in every possible area of SCM including: demand management and forecasting; production planning and scheduling; warehousing and inventory management; logistics; network design; procurement; customer service; sales and operations planning; and supply chain organization design.
Thanks to my Ph.D. work (advised by William W. George Chair Pinar Keskinocak) at Georgia Tech and my experience at McKinsey, I have focused on various industries with supply chain and operations projects and research such as health care; medical devices; high tech; consumer packaged goods; logistics; industrial engineering; and private equity.
At SCW, I wanted to bring my knowledge and insights of SCM best practices, while recognizing the need for industry-specific domain knowledge to add real value. I started SCW with the pharma industry as our primary focus, with an eye toward expanding our services to other industries over time. The key value I brought with me to SCW was the ability to see end-to-end supply chain operations and to bring systems-level thinking to any client situation.
Supply Chain Wizard is a fairly young company. Describe what it does and what motivated you to found it.
In 2013, I was driving from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, to Princeton, New Jersey, when I came up with the company name “Supply Chain Wizard.” I was returning from an invited talk I gave to Carnegie Mellon University business students on consulting skills. I started dreaming about how SCW could be a leading organization globally – a thought leader in the area of SCM and business transformations.
This is my first entrepreneurial experience, and I am dedicated to making it my last one, as I hope to retire from SCW and put my Ph.D. to use by teaching supply chain management at a university during my retirement years.
SCW is currently focused on supply chain traceability and supply chain security in the pharmaceutical industry. We help clients implement the supply chain infrastructure they need to secure their supply chains from counterfeit drugs. This is a major regulatory requirement in more than 40 countries.
Besides our consulting services, we are building innovative software solutions using Internet of Things (IoT) technologies, Big Data analytics, and machine-learning approaches to solve our clients’ supply chain problems.
What is the secret to Supply Chain Wizard’s rapid growth and success?
We are one of the fastest growing companies in our industry, having captured some of the largest client accounts in the industry (including four of the top five U.S. generic drug manufacturers). The primary reason for our success is building a strong foundation of knowledge and expertise into repeatable processes using our software tools. We are not only providing client services; we are also providing software solutions to support our client services team, and eventually leaving behind these software solutions for our clients as a way to have sustainable impact.
Our aim is to digitize our clients’ factory and supply chain operations, so they can continuously improve their bottom line. We are now operating in five countries – the U.S., Turkey, Germany, the Netherlands, and India – serving global clients.
What significant issues do you think will impact supply chain management in the next three to five years?
Supply chains are going digital already. I wrote a recent blog post about “Self-Driving Supply Chain (SDSC): 7 Technology Platforms That Will Take Over Your Job.” The key message of this article was about the supply chain automation that already has started with the self-driving cars movement by Google, Amazon, and other leading technology companies for automated deliveries.
This movement toward automation threatens traditional jobs as we know them, opening the path to a more advanced set of design jobs. We will see a significant push toward the automation and digitization of supply chains in the next three to five years. But this is just the start.
These trends will bring one of the most difficult challenges we see in SCM, which is the supply chain talent gap. We already have a major talent gap in the supply chain field, and these trends will widen that gap, at least in the short term.
Schools like ISyE – that have the ability to generate many talented supply chain professionals – will need to work closely with industry players to address this issue.
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]]>A refereed journal, IISE Transactions publishes original, high-quality papers with a strong methodological focus on real problems that impact engineering practice and research. The journal publishes research motivated by critical and complex engineering problems that arise in a wide variety of domains including manufacturing, service, public policy, health care, security, biotechnology, transportation, and others.
As editor-in-chief, Shi will be responsible for the technical content and direction of the journal, selection of the focused area editors and all editorial board appointments, oversight of the publication process of the journal, management of the IISE Transactions best papers awards, and enhancing the visibility and prestige of IISE Transactions. His goals for his EIC tenure are “to contribute to the prestigious reputation of IISE Transactions as a top-tier journal in our profession and to promote the frontier research of the industrial and systems engineering community.”
Shi said, “Special-focus issues will be the mechanism to promote new emerging areas and to nurture authorship, referees, and reader groups.”
He has also served as focus issue editor, interim focus issue editor, department editor, and editorial board member for IISE Transactions.
In an IISE news release, outgoing editor-in-chief Ronald Askin called Shi a “world-class researcher.”
“Shi has done an excellent job as the focus issue editor for quality and reliability engineering,” Askin said. “I’m confident his vision and energy will lead to increased quality and visibility for IISE Transactions over the next four years.”
Widely recognized for his numerous contributions to the field, Shi is an early pioneer in the development and application of data-enabled manufacturing. His algorithms integrate system informatics, advanced statistics, and control theory for the design and operational improvements of manufacturing and service systems by fusing engineering systems models with data science methods. The technologies developed in his research group have been implemented in various production systems with significant economic impacts.
Shi received IISE’s David F. Baker Distinguished Research Award and Albert G. Holzman Distinguished Educator Award and is a fellow of IISE, the American Society of Mechanical Engineering, INFORMS (the Institute of Operations Research and the Management Sciences), and an academician of the International Academy for Quality.
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]]>The Red Cross partnered with a team from Georgia Tech’s Stewart School of Industrial & Systems Engineering (ISyE), which includes George Family Foundation Assistant Professor Turgay Ayer, Schneider National Chair in Transportation and Logistics Chelsea White III, Professor Roshan Vengazhiyil, and ISyE Ph.D. student Can Zhang, on their project "American Red Cross Uses Analytics-based Methods to Improve Blood Collection Operations." They have proposed and analyzed an alternate blood collection model to increase the amount of whole blood that can be processed into a critical blood product, cryoprecipitate (cryo), while reducing per unit collection costs. Cryo plays a critical role in clotting and controlling massive hemorrhaging, and is often used in the treatment of massive trauma and many major diseases, including metastasized cancers, cardiac diseases, hepatic failures, and organ transplants. After reviewing blood collecting and processing schedules, collection locations, historical yields rates, and donor-related factors, the researchers developed an advanced analytics-based approach that allowed them to study the potential benefit of the proposed alternate collection model.
The promising findings from this analysis later led to a decision support tool (DST) implemented by the Red Cross Southern Region, which serves more than 120 hospitals in the Southern U.S. The implementation of the DST resulted in a significant increase in the number of whole blood units satisfying the tight collection-to-process completion time constraint for cryo production. In particular, during the fourth quarter of 2016, the Red Cross Southern Region was able to process approximately 1000 more units of cryo per month (an increase of 20 percent) at a slightly lower collection cost, resulting in a 40 percent reduction in the per unit collection cost for cryo. This DST has recently been presented to the executives at the national level of the Red Cross, and plans are in place to extend the implementation of the DST to the 11 other American Red Cross regions in the future.
The Edelman Award recognizes excellence in applying advanced operations research and analytics to transform business and human lives. Edelman finalist teams have improved organizational efficiency, increased profits, brought better products to consumers, helped foster peace negotiations, and saved lives. To date, the finalists for the Edelman Award have contributed to a cumulative impact of over $240 billion.
The 2017 Edelman Award winner will be presented at the Edelman Gala on April 3, 2017, during the INFORMS Conference on Business Analytics and Operations Research in Las Vegas.
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]]>For 2017, the destination was Namibia, where similiar shipments of books were destined for school children. The occasion was provided by Glynda Ratliff, through her experience with Ultimate Safaris and its support of The Conservation Travel Foundation. To start the race, Bartholdi and his students went online to fill out shipping forms, then took the packages to a nearby branch of Intown Business Center which accepts shipments for UPS, FedEx, and DHL.
Learn more about the project and see the final results.
The student project is sponsored by The Supply Chain & Logistics Institute, Georgia Institute of Technology
]]>As human spaceflight inches closer to launching a Mars mission, onboard planning and mission adjustments loom large as potential issues. On a Mars flight, the communications lag time with Mission Control will be between four and 22 minutes, and astronauts need to be able to make some decisions on their own, especially in the event of an emergency.
When the best-laid plans need to be adjusted, how do astronauts reconnoiter?
This question is at the heart of "Technologies for Mixed-Initiative Plan Management for Human Space Flight," research conducted by three Georgia Tech engineering professors: Martin Savelsbergh, James C. Edenfield Chair and professor in the Stewart School of Industrial & Systems Engineering (ISyE); Karen Feigh, an associate professor in the Daniel Guggenheim School of Aerospace Engineering (AE); and Amy Pritchett, David S. Lewis Professor of Cognitive Engineering in AE.
This research – which the team is just beginning to explore – recently received a two-year, $600,000 NASA Early Stage Innovation (ESI) grant. Together Feigh, Pritchett, and Savelsbergh will work toward developing technology that will allow on-board astronauts to develop their own short- and long-term plans for accomplishing mission objectives.
Feigh said that the team will focus on developing a computational structure and representation of tasks that astronauts must complete. Each task will be defined not only by its obvious demands, but by the constraints it creates. Tasks will be subdivided into sub-tasks and “sub-sub-tasks,” she said, to get the full scope of activity mapped out. The team will then develop a computational algorithm that can derive optimal short- and long-term plans to meet different goals.
Savelsbergh, who works on autonomous scheduling problems in ISyE, said, “The idea here is to explore mechanisms that support more autonomous decision-making. There are several challenging aspects to doing so. The aspect that I’m interested in most is the algorithms that make decisions or suggest decisions, i.e., automatically compute plan changes. This is especially challenging because plan changes have to be evaluated based on multiple different criteria. This is the part of the project where my expertise contributes most.
“Also, because we are dealing with astronauts, there is the question of how we interact with that individual. Our algorithms suggest changes to the plans; how do we communicate those decisions to the astronauts if we offer choices? Can they overrule what we propose? How can they convey information about what’s happening? In other words, how can the team structure and represent information so that communication with the astronaut goes smoothly?”
“It’s certainly an interesting problem,” Savelsbergh added.
]]>When the best-laid plans need to be adjusted, how do astronauts reconnoiter?
This question is at the heart of "Technologies for Mixed-Initiative Plan Management for Human Space Flight," research conducted by three Georgia Tech engineering professors, including ISyE's Martin Savelsbergh, James C. Edenfield Chair and professor.
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]]>Now, researchers at the Georgia Tech Manufacturing Institute are working on a tool that could help cardiologists care for patients with the disease.
Using highly detailed imaging from CT scans, mechanical engineers are using 3-D printers to make an exact model of an individual patient’s heart valve. These one-of-a-kind models not only represent the size and proportion of the heart valve but can also mimic its physiological qualities — such as how it feels and responds to pressure.
The goal is to provide doctors with a new tool for planning procedures to treat aortic stenosis, a condition in which the valves in the left side of the heart narrow, restricting blood flow and potentially leading to heart failure. The condition is commonly associated with elderly patients, and its prevalence is thought to be on the rise as the population ages.
The 3-D printed heart valve models are particularly useful in planning a minimally invasive procedure called transcatheter aortic valve replacement (TAVR), during which heart doctors use a catheter to deliver a prosthetic heart valve to replace the patient’s impaired valve.
The procedure is a great option for patients who are at high risk for complications with a standard open-heart valve replacement surgery. The prosthetic valves are readily available in a range of types and sizes from multiple manufacturers; however, one of the most important factors for a positive outcome is matching up the patient’s natural heart valve with a prosthetic of the right type and size. That’s where the 3-D model comes into play.
“The issue is, everybody is different,” said Chuck Zhang, a professor in the Stewart School of Industrial & Systems Engineering. “A male will be different than a female. It’s a big challenge for the doctors to select the right type of that prosthesis for a specific patient.”
Creating a custom model that moves, feels, and stretches similar to a patient’s own valve can make picking the right valve much simpler, he said.
Zhen Qian, chief of Cardiovascular Imaging Research at Piedmont Heart Institute, which has partnered with Georgia Tech researchers on the project, said the 3-D printed models hold great promise for use in preparing for heart procedures.
“The results are quite encouraging,” Qian said. "Our printed model is able to tell you before the procedure how much paravalvular leakage there will be and where it is, a good indicator for short- and long-term mortality.”
Picking the right type and size and getting a good seal between the prosthetic and the natural cardiac valve wall is key to preventing blood leaking around the prosthetic. That’s where a personalized 3-D printed model can help.
The models are created by a machine that is capable of multimaterial 3-D printing. The researchers are able to adjust the design parameters — such as diameter and curving wavelength — of the metamaterial used for printing, which allows them to more closely mimic physiological properties of the tissue.
For example, the models can recreate conditions such as calcium deposition, which is a common underlying factor of aortic stenosis.
Zhang has been experimenting with embedding sensors on the models as well, using a machine that can print nanomaterial-enabled circuitry on the wall of the valve. The sensors could potentially be used to monitor how much a prosthetic valve strains or deforms the model. With this sensing capability, the printed heart valve also can be used as a phantom to monitor pre-surgery practice.
So far, the researchers have printed almost two dozen heart valve models based on actual patient imaging. They are now using images and data from patients who have already undergone the procedure to better analyze how well the models can predict the success of the prosthetics. The next step will be to have the models printed before the procedure for inclusion in the pre-surgery planning phase.
“There is big potential for these models,” Zhang said. “We’re thinking in the future, this may be a standard tool for pre-surgery planning and for training new surgeons.”
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