Monday, March 24, 2014

Save the Dates - Two Upcoming Techie Talks at the Isenberg School Thanks to the UMass Amherst INFORMS Student Chapter

Spring break is over and we have only about 6 weeks of the spring semester left.

The UMass Amherst INFORMS Student Chapter and I, as the Chapter's Faculty Advisor, are quite excited about our upcoming speakers.

This Friday, March 28, we will be hosting Dr. Eric Gonzales of the Civil and Environmental Engineering Department at UMass Amherst. He will be speaking on Coordinating Traffic and Transit Systems: Linking Transportation Science and Economics. Dr. Gonzales received his PhD from UC Berkeley and his dissertation advisor was Professor Carlos Daganzo, who is the most recent recipient of the Robert Herman Lifetime Achievement Award in Transportation Science announced at the INFORMS Minneapolis meeting last Fall. Dr. Daganzo was also elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 2014.  Professor Gonzales was previously at Rutgers University and we are very happy that he is now, as of this semester, at UMass Amherst.

Also, on Friday, April 18, we will be hosting my colleague, Professor Ryan Wright of the Operations & Information Management Department. Professor Wright will be speaking on Towards a Behavioral Model of Online Deception Detection. This topic is also fascinating. Dr. Wright is a fellow Canadian and he and I spoke at the UMass Amherst TEDx event last November and were nominated by students, which was such a nice and pleasant surprise. He instructs the required information management course at the Isenberg School to an audience of hundreds.

I hope that you can join us for these talks. We have also invited another speaker so stay tuned!
For more information about the UMass Amherst INFORMS Student Chapter, please visit its website.