This article was originally published at UC Berkeley IEOR.
Today, students came together for the first annual IEOR Graduate Student Symposium. PhD students presented on a broad array of topics representative of the many areas where IEOR tools are applicable including supply chains, energy systems, robotics, health care, neuroimaging, and others. This first symposium was initiated and organized by graduates with the goal of helping PhD students connect and share research.
“Yonatan and I were talking about how it would nice to have a one day event where all the PhD students could present their work,” said Auyon Siddiq, an IEOR PhD student who helped lead the initiative.
“For the longest time, people would complain that research is very isolated and siloed,” said IEOR PhD student Yonatan Mintz who helped organize the symposium with Auyon. “It got to this point where it was like — we only have so many students in the department, but until today if you would have asked me what most of these people were researching I would have had literally no clue what they were doing at all.”
So, Auyon and Yonatan decided to take action on their idea to have a one day conference. Besides wanting to help students learn more about what each other were working on, they also knew that students were looking for opportunities to practice their presentation skills. Plus, they thought it would be a good way to build community as it is difficult to get all the graduate students in one room as they are very busy with research, classes, and teaching other students. The only other time where students come together consistently is for the department seminar, but the speakers for this are chosen by the faculty.
“We thought it would be fun to have something that was run by students,” explained Auyon.
The faculty and the department also saw the value in the idea and gave their full support which Auyon and Yonatan said made things much easier. The department provided food for the event and helped book the room, but most of the heavy lifting was done by the students themselves to organize twelve speakers who each gave a twenty minute talk.
Speakers, presentation titles, and photos for IEOR Graduate Symposium 2016:
Centralized and Decentralized Supply Chain Collaboration
Shiman Ding
Simplex-Based Methods for Programs with Conic Quadratic Objective
Andrés Gómez
Semi-Supervised Learning in Robotics
Animesh Garg
M-CAFE V1.0: Motivating and Prioritizing Ongoing Student Feedback Using Collaborative Filtering
Mo Zhou
Improved Algorithms Solving Generalizations of Isotonic Median Regression
Cheng Lyu
Inverse Optimization with Noisy Data
Auyon Siddiq
Scheduling Personalized Weight Loss Interventions Using Predictive Analytics
Yonatan Mintz
Novel Algorithms for Automatic Segmentation and Signal Extraction in Calcium Imaging Data
Quico Spaen
A Strong Semidefinite Programming Relaxation of the Unit Commitment Problem
Morteza Ashraphijuo
Design of Optimal Static Distributed Control
Salar Fattahi
Stochastic Unit Commitment with Topology Control Recourse for Renewables Integration
Jiaying Shi
Comparing Welfare Effects of Retail Electricity Tariffs by Simulation
Clay Campaigne