[ IIT Delhi - IBM IRL OR Weekend;   ]

 

Brenda is the Director of the Mathematical Sciences Department at IBM's T.J.Watson Reseach Lab. She has been a member of the INFORMS Roundtable, served on the INFORMS board as VP for Practice, was chair of the advisory committee for the first two Practice meeting, and is currently the President-elect of INFORMS. Brenda obtained a Ph.D. in Operations Research and Industrial Engineering from the Cornell University. She joined IBM Research in 1984. Follow this link for more details.













2. Prof. Abhiram Ranade, IIT Mumbai.
Professor Abhiram Ranade received a B.Tech degree in Electrical Engineering from IIT Bombay in 1981 and a doctorate in Computer Science from Yale University in 1989. He was was an Assistant Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of California, Berkeley during 1988-95. Since 1995 he is on the faculty of IIT Bombay, currently as a Professor of Computer Science and Engineering. His research interests are in Algorithms and Combinatorial Optimization. Follow this link for more details.

Professor Ranade will talk on the Mumbai Navigator. Mumbai Navigator, www.cse.iitb.ac.in/navigator, is a travel planning program for the city of Mumbai. Given the starting point of the journey and the destination, the program generates a travel plan using public buses and trains. The plans are based on a stochastic model of bus arrival, and are adaptive, i.e. depending upon which bus arrives first a different subplan might be recommended. Under reasonable assumptions the generated plans can be shown to be optimal. The site has been operational for several years now, and draws about 100,000 hits every year, and apparently generates good plans. A preliminary implementation of a map interface is ready.













3. Dr. Brian Eck, Director, IBM Integrated Supply Chain and Operations.
Dr. Brian Eck is a Senior Technical Staff Member and Director of Strategy, IT and Business Transformation in IBM Singapore. Dr. Eck obtained his Phd in operations research from Columbia University. He has served as an adjunct faculty at Columbia University, at New York University Stern School of Business, and currently at National University of Singapore. He is currently based in Singapore. He will be talking about operations research's role in building on-demand supply chain.













4. Mr. Biswajit Roy Chowdhury, Tata Steel.
Mr. Biswajit has over 20 years of experience at Tata Steel and has worked on many aspects of operations and supply chain of Tata Steel. He will be talking on the operational challenges in the steel industry.













5. Mr. Bharat Salhotra, Indian Railways.
Mr. Bharat Salhotra is currently working in Indian Railways, one of the largest transport networks in the world. As part of a high powered International team set up by the World Bank for transforming Indian Railways into a world class transport and logistics organizations, Mr. Salhotra has provided leadership for the design and development of a suite of software tools for network capacity planning. These tools involve use of Optimization tools, simulation modeling and a slew of traffic forecasting models for long range planning and are being used to determine long term investment strategies as well as financial requirements over the next 20 years.

Mr. Salhotra has a number of firsts to his credit, among these, the design & development of the first Online Transaction Processing System on Indian Railways, the first passenger train profitability modeling software and a fundamental redefinition of network capacities and throughput.

Mr. Salhotra is a Sloan Fellow with an MBA from MIT's Sloan School of Management. While at MIT, he led a team of Sloan Fellows for re-strategizing United Parcel Service's business in the light of the Internet revolution and globalization trends. He has a number of publications to his credit, including one coauthored with the Deputy Dean of The MIT Sloan School for publication in Harvard Business Review.















6. Dr. Anand Srinivasan, Sabre Airline Solutions.
Dr. Anand Srinivasan is with the Sabre Airline Solutions. Sabre is a leader in the area of airline products and services. Sabre provides industry expertise and pacesetting tools that help customers increase revenue, streamline operations, improve workflow, and raise productivity. Its products include Decision Support and Planning Solutions, and Reservations and Departure Control Solutions. Dr. Srinivasan is currently based in Bangalore and will talk about his work in the airline operations.







7. Dr. Ladanyi has received his MSc in Mathematics from Eotvos Lorand University in Hungary then his PhD in Operations Research from Cornell University. He is a Research Staff Member at IBM since 1997. His main research area is computational optimization focusing on integer programming and parallel programming. He is an active member of COIN-OR Foundation and the maintainer and developer of several software projects there.



Title: Wireless frequency auctions: Mixed Integer Programs and Dantzig-Wolfe decomposition



Abstract: In this talk we will first describe an application, the FCC Auction #31, and its two formulations: one with a compact representation solvable via branch-and-cut, and one with column generation using branch-and-price. Then we will show how the two relate to each other via Dantzig-Wolfe decomposition leading to a branch-cut-price algorithm. This algorithm applies to any MIP whose constraint matrix is block diagonal with a set connecting constraints. Then we show how to solve problems with multiple (lexicographic) objective by extending the applicability of linear complementarity to integer programming. Finally, we discuss the case when connecting variables are present beside connecting constraints; and we will privide some insights what kind of problems might benefit from applying our algorithm.



This is joint work with Dr. Marta Eso and Dr. David Jensen.











8. Prof. Ashok Mittal is a professor at the Industrial and Mangament Engineering Department at IIT Kanpur since 1984. He has been a Dean of Research and Development and also a Dean of planning and resource generation at IITK. He holds a Ph.D. in Operations Research from Case Western and is an executive committee member of Operatiosn Research Society of India.