Seminars

We are pleased to invite you to attend the Department of Management Science and Engineering seminar series in the Faculty of Engineering at the University of Waterloo!

Our seminar series often accommodates a variety of talks such as research-oriented, Ph.D. student, and practitioner-oriented talks. Topics in the series include, among other, energy systems, optimisation, logistics and supply chain, healthcare, information and communications technologies, and socio-technical systems. 
 
The audience, usually 15-25 in size, is primarily composed of faculty and graduate students from the Department of Management Science and Engineering, although other faculty, students and industrial professionals frequently attend. 

The department seminar series' coordinator is Kejia Zhu

Degree Requirements

  • MASC students are required to attend 8 seminars for degree completion
  • MMSc students are required to attend 4 seminars for degree completion
  • Students must attend the entire seminar (at least 45 minutes) to receive credit

Note: To receive credit, students can only attend MSE Department Research Seminars. 


PhD Seminars |  MASc Seminars |  Past Seminars

Department Research Seminars:

Uncertainty management in radiotherapy via AI & optimization 

Speaker: Dr. Akra Roy 
Alvarez College of Business 
Date: July 19th 2:00pm-3:00pm EDT 
E7 Faculty Hall (E7-7303, E7-7363) 

Abstract: In radiotherapy, uncertainties can reduce the quality of treatments; deterministic treatments can lead to suboptimal outcomes for the patient. Ultimately, this can cause over- or under-treatment, leading to dysfunctional organs from excessive radiation exposure or tumour metastasis from poor coverage and a failed treatment. 

In this talk, we will explore methods from the areas of optimization under uncertainty and artificial intelligence (AI) that can account for two sources of uncertainties, some examples include: 

  • Radio resistance 

  • Contouring errors. 

While standard AI methods and (naïve-) robust treatment planning can overcome this, they can also produce overly conservative or suboptimal decisions, especially when there are unpredictable changes during the treatment. 

To overcome this, a predictive-prescriptive adaptive framework is proposed that can adapt to updated information during the treatment. Using this framework, we will explore the value of multiple diagnostics to update the treatment and derive optimal intervention policies that account for time-dependent uncertainties.   

Uncertainties in the airspace: from distributionally robust air traffic flow management to stochastic routing problems for drone package delivery systems 

Speaker: Professor Max Z. Li 
University of Michigan 
Date: February 21st 2:00pm-3:00pm EDT 
E7 Faculty Hall (E7-7303, E7-7363) 

Abstract: The US National Airspace System (NAS) is becoming increasingly interconnected, and data driven. The Information-Centric NAS vision laid out by the US Federal Aviation Administration encapsulates this, with focus on growing operations, infrastructure for traffic management, and safety assurance, all to increase predictability and resilience. However, given the myriad sources of dynamic uncertainty inherent within the NAS, predictions must incorporate not just this uncertainty, but the potential that the uncertainty itself is incorrectly modeled or characterized. To this end, I will discuss applications of distributionally robust optimization to a family of integer optimization problems for air traffic management decision-making (which flights to delay, and for how long). I will then move to discuss the impact of airspace and environmental uncertainties (e.g., stochastic winds) on new airspace entrants such as drones and other un-crewed aerial systems (UAS) and explore methods for characterizing and accounting for uncertainties. 


Waterloo Institute for Nanotechnology


Past Seminars

2022

Date 

Speaker 

Affiliation 

Specialization 

Title 

1/21/2022 

Joohyun Kim 

Department of Operations Research and Engineering Management, Southern Methodist University 

Optimization of Consumer-Producer Storage in Renewable Energy Markets: A Mean Field Approach

1/19/2022 

Hanazhang Qin 

Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems, MIT 

A New Approach for Vehicle Routing with Stochastic Demand: Combining Route Assignment with Process Flexibility

1/17/2022 

Paola Martin 

McCombs School of Business, University of Texas at Austin 

Trade Credit and Sales Data Visibility

1/11/2022 

Yue Hu 

Graduate School of Business, Columbia Business School 

Prediction-Driven Surge Planning with Application in the Emergency Department

2021

Date

Speaker

Affiliation

Specialization

Title

5/14/2021 

Ruxian Wang 

Carey Business School, Johns Hopkins University 

Hybrid Search and Choice Framework: Modeling, Optimization and Estimation

5/11/2021 

Sirisha Rambhatla 

Department of Computer Science, University of Southern California 

Provably Learning from Data: New Algorithms and Models for Matrix and Tensor Decompositions 

5/5/2021 

Takanori Fujiwara 

Department of Computer Science, University of California  

Comparative Analysis with Intelligent Visual Interfaces

4/30/2021 

Chen Ma 

School of Computer Science, McGill University 

Towards Effective Recommendation: Auxiliary Data and Personalized Hyper-parameter Learning

4/12/2021 

Alison Olechowski 

Troost Institute for Leadership Education in Engineering, University Toronto 

The Future of Design of Physical Products: Studies of Collaborative Virtual Engineering Teams

2/22/2021  

Francois Lafond 

Smith School for Enterprise and the Environment University of Oxford 

Can stimulating demand drive costs down? World War II as a natural experiment 

2020

Date 

Speaker 

Affiliation 

Specialization 

Title 

12/14/2020 

Dr. Atalay Atasu 

Georgia Institute of Technology, Scheller College of Business 

Operations Research 

Leasing, Modularity and Circular Economy 

11/09/2020 

Dr. Dilip Soman 

Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto 

Behavioural Economics 

Scaling Choice Architecture Interventions 

2019

Date 

Speaker 

Affiliation 

Specialization 

Title 

11/25/2019 

Ilbin Lee 

University of Alberta 

Operations Research 

Is Separately Modeling Subpopulations Beneficial for Sequential Decision-Making? 

10/28/2019 

Stefan Nickel 

Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) 

Operations Research 

The Day After Optimal: Operations Research for Modern Logistics 

10/21/2019 

Maxwell Ramstead 

McGill University 

Philosophy, Neuroscience, Psychiatry 

Active Inference Across Scales: From the Brain to the Body and Culture 

10/11/2019 

Daria Terkhov 

Department of Mechanical, Industrial and Aerospace Engineering; Gina Cody School of Engineering and Computer Science, Concordia University 

Operations Research 

Inverse Optimization, Machine Learning, and the Operations Research Challenge (Torch) 

9/30/2019 

Kyle Booth 

Mechanical & Industrial Engineering, University of Toronto 

Operations Research 

Exact Methods for Solving Electric Vehicle Routing Problems 

9/23/2019 

Dr. Dror Hermel 

Sun Life 

Operations Research 

Can Coupons Counteract Strategic Consumer Behavior? 

9/16/2019 

Dr. Sean Zhou 

Chinese University of Hong Kong 

Operations Research 

Multilocation Newsvendor Problem: Centralization and Inventory Pooling 

5/21/2019 

Dr. Regis Chenavaz 

KEDGE Business School 

Economics 

When Does Eco-Efficiency Rebound or Backfire? An Analytical Model 

5/13/2019 

Dr. Sota Ichihashi 

The Bank of Canada 

Economics 

Online Privacy and Information Disclosure by Consumers 

3/14/2019 

Dr. Merve Bodur 

Mechanical & Industrial Engineering, University of Toronto 

Operations Research 

Two-stage (Dual) Linear Decision Rules for Multi-stage Stochastic (Integer) Programming 

2018

Date 

Speaker 

Affiliation 

Specialization 

Title 

11/26/2018 

Dr. Yiqiang Q. Zhao 

School of Mathematics and Statistics, Carleton University 

Operations Research 

Optimal Trading Under the Mean-Quadratic Criterion 

11/19/2018 

Dr. Armann Ingolfsson 

Alberta School of Business 

Operations Research 

Comparison of Fluid Approximations for Service Systems with State-Dependent Service Rates and Return Probabilities 

10/29/2018 

Dr. Jingui Xie 

School of Management, University of Science and Technology of China 

Operations Research 

The Analytics of Bed Shortages: Coherent Metric, Prediction and Optimization 

10/19/2018 

Dr. Mahdi Roghanizad 

Adjunct professor at Ivey Business School 

Information systems/Organizational behaviour 

Predicting Cooperativeness: The Medium is the Message 

6/19/2018 

Dr. Oleg Prokopyev 

University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA 

Industrial Engineering 

Sequential Interdiction with Incomplete Information and Learning 

6/11/2018 

Dr. Pinar Keskinocak 

Georgia tech, H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial Engineering, Atlanta, Georgia 

Industrial and Systems Engineering 

Quantitative Models Embedded in Decision-Support Tools for Healthcare Applications 

5/28/2018 

Dr. Evrim Didem Gunes 

Koc University, Istanbul, Turkey 

Operations Research 

Modelling the use of Patient Activation Measure (PAM) in Chronic Care Management 

5/14/2018 

Dr. Kathleen M. Carly 

Carnegie Mellon University 

Computer Science/Organisational Behaviour 

Wisdom & Ignorance:  Managing and Manipulation Groups through Heedful Interaction 

4/17/2018 

Dr. Jose Oliveria 

University of Porto, Industrial Engineering and Management Department, Portugal 

Operations Research 

Waste Minimization: The Contribution of Cutting and Packing Problems for a More Competitive and Environmentally Friendly Industry 

3/26/2018 

Dr. Jonathan Y. Li 

University of Ottawa 

Operations Research 

Optimization for Measuring Risk in Stochastic Programs 

3/12/2018 

Dr. Sebastian Lahie 

Google 

Operations Research/Computational Economics 

Testing Incentive Compatibility in Display Ad Auctions