UMass Amherst Lecture Series Features Experts in Operations Research and Management

Aug. 18, 2009

Contact:

Anna Nagurney 413/545-5635

AMHERST, Mass. – Food safety, the emergency response to Hurricane Katrina and forensic investigations of the Internet are among the topics to be covered in the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences Fall Speaker Series at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

Organized by the award-winning UMass Amherst student chapter of the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS) in the Isenberg School of Management, the series begins Sept. 18.

All talks take place on scheduled Fridays at 11 a.m. in Room 112 of the Isenberg School of Management, unless otherwise noted, and are open to the public.

The six speakers are:

• Mary Helander of the mathematical sciences department of IBM’s T. J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, N.Y., will discuss “Food Safety” on Sept. 18. Her presentation takes place in 128 Isenberg School of Management.

• Andrew Lo, the Harris & Harris Group Professor and director of the Laboratory for Financial Engineering at MIT’s Sloan School of Management, will speak on Oct. 3. His talk is titled “Kill All the Quants?: Models vs. Mania in the Current Financial Crisis.”

• Professor Jose Holquin-Veras, acting head of the department of civil and environmental engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, will discuss “Emergency Logistics Issues Impacting the Response to Katrina: What Went Wrong? What Could We Do to Avoid a Repeat?” on Oct. 23.

• Professor Richard N. Palmer, head of the civil and environmental engineering department at UMass Amherst, will speak on “A Decision Support System for Optimizing Reservoir Operations Using Ensemble Streamflow Predictions (ESP)” on Nov. 6.

• Sam Bowles, research professor and director of the behavioral sciences program at the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico, professor of economics at the University of Siena in Italy, and professor emeritus of economics at UMass Amherst, will deliver his talk, “The Nature of Wealth and the Dynamics of Inequality from Pre-history to the Knowledge-based Economy,” on Nov. 20.

• Brian Levine, associate professor of computer science at UMass Amherst and director of the NSA Center for Academic Excellence in Information Assurance Education will speak on “Forensic Investigation of the Internet and Mobile Systems” on Dec. 4.

Support for the series is provided by the Isenberg School, the department of finance and operations management, the John F. Smith Memorial Fund, and INFORMS.

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