INFORMS Open Forum

CALL for PARTICIPATION – NSF Operations Engineering (OE) Program Workshop at SMU

  • 1.  CALL for PARTICIPATION – NSF Operations Engineering (OE) Program Workshop at SMU

    Posted 01-10-2019 16:03

    CALL for PARTICIPATION – NSF Operations Engineering (OE) Program Workshop at SMU

    NSF Operations Engineering (OE) Program Future Directions Workshop will be held at Southern Methodist University (SMU), Dallas, TX, on March 29-31, 2019. You are encouraged to explore the workshop webpage at https://people.smu.edu/nsfworkshop/ for deadlines, application process, program, and other information.

    The goal of this workshop is to bring together OE-Operations Engineering Program grantees, researchers, and practitioners in an effort to identify challenges and opportunities for the OE research community and promising future research directions with significant impact on theory and practice.

    The workshop aims to achieve its objective in an integrated framework with a focus on both applications and methodologies connected via big data to address realistic solutions to societal problems. Furthermore, in the wake of explosion in data availability and many recent practices it facilitates, the workshop will provide the opportunity to identify a roadmap for curricular changes in teaching OR/MS/Analytics theory and practice to next generation engineers and decision-makers.

    The workshop will facilitate discussions on three interconnected main topics including societal impact, interface of OR/MS/Analytics with human behavior and organizational behavior/change, and analytics education. These high-level discussions will be facilitated via specific contexts including supply chain/logistics and healthcare engineering systems. These application areas collectively represent a significant portion of the service economy in the US and embody important problems that cross-cut contexts and relate to the main topical areas in the scope of the workshop.

    The workshop will start with two keynotes focusing on Supply Chain/Logistics and Healthcare Delivery systems to provide context and to set the stage for discussions on future directions regarding especially the first two main topical areas (societal impact and high-touch systems).  A third keynote will be on Analytics Education as analytics education in the presence of big data relates closely to both topical areas as well as the context areas in the practice of data-to-decisions process. The keynotes are aimed at stimulating discussions in the following breakout sessions and are designed to help expand the question-base for the breakout sessions.

    Our keynote speakers (in alphabetical order) are

    Jeffrey Camm, Associate Dean of Business Analytics and the Inmar Presidential Chair of Analytics at the Wake Forest University School of Business on Analytics Education,

    Mark P. Van Oyen, Professor from Industrial and Operations Engineering at University of Michigan on Healthcare Delivery Systems, and

    Chelsea C. White III, Schneider National Chair in Transportation and Logistics and Professor from Industrial and Systems Engineering at Georgia Tech on Supply Chain/Logistics Systems.

    The keynotes will be followed by multiple breakout sessions each with 10-12 participants. Discussions in each breakout session will be recorded by a scribe in a document that is also shared by the members of the breakout session. Later, these discussion notes will form the basis for a Workshop Report on Future Directions in the OE Program, from the perspective of the research community, to be submitted to NSF.

    Furthermore, the workshop will serve as a venue for participants to display their research via posters in order to share their findings and receive feedback from colleagues and program directors. (Please see the Program tab on the workshop webpage at https://people.smu.edu/nsfworkshop/)



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    Halit Uster
    Professor
    Southern Methodist University
    Dallas TX
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