We hope everyone who attended the Analytics meeting in Orlando enjoyed their experience. Speaking of Florida, check out our April "What's Your StORy?" with Miami Hurricane Tallys Yunes. Read on for our interview with INFORMS long-time member, and this month's star.
Enjoy the Q&A below and feel free to ask more questions on this thread. If you are interested in participating, please contact me or Mary Leszczynski (mary.leszczynski@informs.org).
What's Your StORy?
Tallys Hoover Yunes (not related to the Hoover dam; long story…)
Associate Professor of Management Science
School of Business Administration, University of Miami
INFORMS member since 1999
Which INFORMS event are you most looking forward to this year?
I wasn’t able to attend the 2015 Annual Meeting because of the birth of my first daughter. I’m looking forward to the 2016 Annual Meeting. I miss seeing some of my favorite people.
What is your favorite method of visualizing data?
I really like dot plots and proportional symbol maps.
What is your least favorite mode of transportation? Can you apply a routing problem
to make it better?
Airplanes. They don’t need better routing to get better; they need to become more comfortable.
I’d pay more for an economy ticket for an overall better experience.
Tell us something that not many people know about you.
I don’t eat any kind of red or white meat for 360 days of the year. The other 5 days I allow myself to eat anything and typically go all out. To my wife’s astonishment, my stomach still feels just fine after eating a ton of medium-rare picanha (a cut of meat) at a Brazilian churrascaria (an all-you-can-eat meat extravaganza).
What is something you learned in the last month?
I recently led a group of graduate business students on an international immersion trip to Brazil. I learned that non-Brazilians are very fond of caipirinhas (Google it!) after they try one.
How do you define “analytics”?
The art and science of combining statistics, operations research, and computer science tools to obtain useful information from data with the intent of improving decision making.
What recent project have you been involved in that you are proud of?
Andre Cire, John Hooker, and I recently published a paper in the INFORMS Journal on Computing about using semantic descriptions of variables to improve optimization models. It was an idea that sounded crazy at first, but we persevered and obtained very interesting results. The feedback we received from several researchers has been great. I’m very proud of this project.
Who would win in a fight between Superman and Batman?
Superman. With his super hearing he’d know Batman was coming from miles away and he’d throw a cruise ship on Batman way before the Dark Knight had any chance to pick up the kryptonite.
What INFORMS journal do you read the most? Why?
Interfaces because it is a great source of real-life OR applications that I can use to motivate my students.
What is your spirit animal?
A horse: I enjoy long walks and love when someone brushes my hair.
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Kara Tucker
Production Editor/Marketing Content Specialist
INFORMS
Catonsville MD
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