IORA - Institute of Operations Research and Analytics

INFORMS 2019
2019-10-20 - 2019-10-23
The 2019 INFORMS Annual Meeting is a unique opportunity to connect and network with the more than 6,000 INFORMS members, students, prospective employers and employees, and academic and industry experts who compose the INFORMS community.
It is with great pleasure to share the presentations and awards of IORA faculty, students at the INFORMS 2019 conference that took place in Seattle. Professor Teo Chung Piaw, Provost’s Chair and Director of the Institute of Operations Research and Analytics at NUS Business School, has been honoured by The Institute for Operations Research and Management Sciences (INFORMS) as a fellow, one of a mere dozen selected worldwide annually.

AWARDS

INFORMS FELLOWS: CLASS OF 2019
PROFESSOR TEO CHUNG PIAW
Professor Teo Chung Piaw, Provost’s Chair and Director of the Institute of Operations Research and Analytics at NUS Business School, has been honoured by The Institute for Operations Research and Management Sciences (INFORMS) as a fellow, one of a mere dozen selected worldwide annually.

GEORGE B.DANTZIG DISSERTATION AWARD COMPETITION
DR. GUODONG LYU
Dr. Guodong Lyu is the finalist with his PhD thesis “Online Resource Allocation: Theory and Applications”, under the supervision by Professor Chung-Piaw Teo (IORA, NUS).

2019 INFORMS-SECTION ON FINANCE BEST STUDENT PAPER COMPETITION
MR. SHUAIJIE QIAN
Mr. Shuaijie Qian was awarded the first place in “2019 Informs-Section on Finance Best Student Paper Competition”. This year the competition has attracted many talented students worldwide, including Columbia University and University of Pennsylvania.

PAPER PRESENTATION

PROFESSOR JOEL GOH

IORA Faculty Member, Prof Joel Goh presented a paper titled “Design of Incentive Programs for Optimal Medication Adherence“

PROFESSOR WENJIE TANG
IORA Faculty Member, Prof Wenjie Tang presented a paper titled “Invention Integrality And Gender Composition In Innovation Teams.“

DR AARON, JINJIA HUANG
IORA Research Fellow, Dr Aaron, Jinjia Huang presented a paper titled “Sparse and Efficient Rebalancing Operations: Concentrating the Flows in Dynamic Network“.”

HONG MING TAN
IORA PHD Student, Hong Ming Tan presented a paper titled “Information, Investment and Risk management.”

DR QINSHEN TANG
IORA Research Fellow, Dr Qinshen Tang presented a paper titled ”

Joint pricing and production: an analytics perspective
Repositioning for vehicle sharing: a risk mitigation perspective

DR SATYANATH BHAT
IORA Research Fellow, Dr Satyanath Bhat presented a paper titled “Doubled Dipping of Two-sided Platform Economy“

DR SHEN YICHI
IORA Research Fellow, Dr Shen Yichi presented a paper titled “Using Radial Basis Functions to Optimize Expensive Functions with Heterogenous Noise“

NUS National Observance Ceremony 2019
2019-08-09 09:30 - 13:30 (Asia/Singapore) | University Hall, National University of Singapore, 21 Lower Kent Ridge Rd, 119077, Singapore
IORA took part in NUS National Day Observance Ceremony held on Thursday, 8 August 2019 at University Hall, National University of Singapore. Dr Huang Jinjia, IORA Research Fellow, presented the SDPNAL+ software.
The software SDPNAL+ is designed for solving semidefinite programming (SDP), an important subfield of mathematical optimization and its applications are growing rapidly. Many practical problems in operations research and machine learning can be modeled or approximated as SDP problems. Traditional optimization methods can only solve small and medium scale (say, matrix dimension is less than 2000 and the number of constraints is less than 5000) SDP. Fortunately, large-scale SDP can be solved efficiently by SDPNAL+ now. Numerical experiments in the paper and other benchmark tests show that SDPNAL+ is a state-of-the-art solver for large-scale SDP and it is the only viable software to solve many large-scale SDPs at present. The largest SDP problem that is solved has matrix dimension 9261 and the number of constraints more than 12 million, which boosts the solvable scale to thousands of times. This software, developed by IORA faculty Prof Toh Kim Chuan, has won the 2018 Beale-Orchard-Hays Prize, the highest honor in the field of Computational Mathematical Optimization. In particular, the prize jury chair Dr. Michael Grant presented a concrete example shared by the nominator. It takes 122 hours for the traditional solver to solve a problem in a cluster with 56 cores CPU and 128 GPUs while SDPNAL+ solves it within 1.5 hours in a normal desktop PC. This new solver has many applications in practice. For instance, in a recent study, another IORA team of researchers have used this software to develop the backbone network structure to support bike rebalancing operations by volunteers
in a system like the Bike Angel program in New York, and demonstrated big reduction in the number of redundant moves by volunteers in such a system (i.e. with much less incentives), but with essentially the same level of performance (number of rides supported).
