Yesterday, the UMass Amherst INFORMS Student Chapter held its annual INFORMS Tune-Up event at which PhD students, who are chapter members, practice the presentations that they will give at the upcoming INFORMS Annual Meeting. This year, the conference will take place in Atlanta, Georgia, October 26-29, 2025. The website for the conference is here: https://www.informs.org/Meetings-Conferences/INFORMS-Conference-Calendar/2025-INFORMS-Annual-Meeting
The presenters and their titles are on the poster below.
It was great to have speakers from the Mechanical and Industrial Engineering Department (MIE) at UMass Amherst as well as from the Operations and Information Management (OIM) Department.
I very much enjoyed all the talks. Ali Jafari and Yukti Kathuria are from MIE and Samira Samadi, Ismael Pour, and Dana Hassani are from the OM side of OIM. The latter three are also my PhD students.
The audience included faculty and students and valuable comments and suggestions were given on the presentations and there were also great questions. It was an excellent practice session.
The presentations by Ali and Yukti focused on on unsupervised learning approaches and Bayesian networks to healthcare, respectively, and those by Samira, Ismael, and Dana were on food quality under trade disruptions, integrated crop and cargo war risk insurance, and the quantification of international trade network performance, respectively.
Samira's presentation was based on a paper that we co-authored with Professor Deniz Besik of the University of Richmond.
Ismael's paper was based on a paper that we co-authored with Professor Borys Kormych of the Odesa Law Academy and which is the lead article in the January (2026) issue of the International Transactions in Operational Research. It is available for free here:
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/itor.70038?af=R
Dana's paper, in turn, was also co-authored with me, and with colleagues at the Kyiv School of Economics (KSE), Oleg Nivievskyi and Pavlo Martyshev. The paper was published in the latest Dynamics of Disasters (2024) co-edited volume: https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-031-74006-0_7
Special thanks to faculty: Professor Peter Haas of the Manning College of Information and Computer Sciences, UMass Amherst, Professor Hari Balasubramanian of MIE, and Professor Zihao Qu of OIM for taking the time to support the students and offering their suggestions.
I took the nice photo below:
The pizza, fresh fruit, and coffee were delicious.
This student chapter will be recognized at the INFORMS Atlanta conference with the Cum Laude Award on October 27. We will have a nice group there to receive the award and to also celebrate!
I have been the chapter's Faculty Advisor since its inception in 2004 and have very much enjoyed seeing how the students have grown professionally and socially. I stay in touch with many once they receive their PhDs and go on to careers either in academia or industry!
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