Invited Speakers

Adam Wierman
Competitive Control via Online Optimization (click for abstract and slides)

Bio
Adam Wierman is a Professor in the Department of Computing and Mathematical Sciences (CMS) at the California Institute of Technology. He is the director of the Information Science and Technology (IST) initiative and served as Executive Officer (a.k.a. Department Chair) of CMS from 2015-2020. He received his Ph.D., M.Sc., and B.Sc. in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University in 2007, 2004, and 2001, respectively, and has been a faculty at Caltech since 2007.

Adam’s research strives to make the networked systems that govern our world sustainable and resilient. He develops new mathematical tools in machine learning, optimization, control, and economics and applies these tools to design new algorithms and markets that can be deployed in data centers, the electricity grid, transportation systems, and beyond. He is best known for his work spearheading the design of algorithms for sustainable data centers, which led to significant industry adoption, and was named a Computerworld Honors Laureate.

He is a recipient of multiple awards, including the ACM SIGMETRICS Rising Star award, the IEEE Communications Society William R. Bennett Prize, an NSF Career Award, and multiple teaching awards. He is also a co-author of papers that have received best paper awards at a wide variety of conferences across computer science, power engineering, and operations research including ACM Sigmetrics, IEEE INFOCOM, IFIP Performance, and IEEE PES.

Pinar Keskinocak
Infectious Disease Modeling, Projecting Disease Spread, and Evaluating the Impact of Interventions (click for abstract)

Bio
Pinar Keskinocak is the William W. George Chair and Professor in the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering at Georgia Tech. She is also co-founder and director of the Center for Health and Humanitarian Systems. Previously, she served as the College of Engineering ADVANCE Professor and as interim associate dean for faculty development and scholarship. Prior to joining Georgia Tech, she worked at IBM T.J. Watson Research Center. She received her Ph.D. in Operations Research from Carnegie Mellon University. She is an INFORMS Fellow, and was the 2020 President of INFORMS.

Dr. Keskinocak's research focuses on the applications of operations research and management science with societal impact, particularly health and humanitarian applications, supply chain management, and logistics/transportation. Her recent work has addressed infectious disease modeling (including Covid-19, malaria, Guinea worm, pandemic flu), evaluating intervention strategies, and resource allocation; catch-up scheduling for vaccinations; hospital operations management; disaster preparedness and response (e.g., prepositioning inventory); debris management; centralized and decentralized price and lead time decisions. She has worked on projects with companies, governmental and non-governmental organizations, and healthcare providers, including American Red Cross, CARE, Carter Center, CDC, Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta, Emory University, and Intel Corporation.