On April 5 Thursday afternoon, Samir Elhedhli, President of the Canadian Operational Research Society (CORS) and Professor of Management Science at the University of Waterloo, is coming to University of Toronto to give a talk in the topics of modern optimization technologies in Green Engineering. He will present the latest research related to the study of a carbon tax policy. He will show how to use mathematical program to model the problem. The proposed policy is found to achieve a good balance between ease of implementation and social benefits
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This research is motivated by the desire to incorporate system-modelling tools in the policy-making process at the Ontario Ministry of Health and Long-Term Care (MOHLTC) to facilitate a better understanding of the system-wide effects of decisions, and the sources for policy resistance. The specific objective for the Cross-Sector Patient Flow Model (the model) is to develop a system dynamics simulation of the patient flows between the health system sectors in a Local Health Integration Network (LHIN), with a focus on seniors as the main cohort. In the model, similar providers are aggregated into clusters such as acute care and rehabilitation. The linkages are conceptualized to be between these clusters and not the individual providers of the LHIN. As such, this simulation can be characterized as macro-level patient flow model of a LHIN.
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Introduction of a new, innovative product or service is a fundamental problem that managers face regularly. The temporal sales pattern of such a product is often influenced by the word-of-mouth and reputation of the product. Appropriate marketing support strategies must be specified to induce the best sales pattern; however, the success of these strategies is heavily tied to the accessibility of the retail facilities, whether physical stores or virtual ones such as internet or phone. In this work, we present a general model for the joint design of the network of retail facilities and marketing strategies in the presence of word-of-mouth effects....
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We consider the problem of modeling and forecasting highway accidents in the presence of harsh winter driving conditions. The weather process is modeled as a finite state space continuous time homogeneous Markov chain. Accidents follow a point process model with intensity function that depends on the weather process.....
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Intensity-modulated radiation therapy is a form of radiation therapy used to treat cancer. Using IMRT for total marrow irradiation presents challenges in beam orientation optimization due to large target size and presence of many organs. Fast methods to determine beam orientations through heuristics demonstrate comparable plans and offer more flexibility than exact solvers..
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Throughout history there have been many examples of innovations that "for-some-reason" were incredibly successful. On the flip-side, there are also numerous examples of innovations that may be deemed as incredible failures. New products are an important source of sales and profit for a firm; furthermore, new product developments typically involve large financial commitments. As a result, forecasting the acceptance of a new product would be a significant advantage to any firm. However, this task can often be difficult which is evident from the number of failed products that have been introduced to market.
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Breast cancer is the most frequently diagnosed type of cancer and the leading cause of cancer deaths in females worldwide. It accounted for 23% of the total new cancer cases in females and 14% of the total cancer deaths in females in 2008. Studies on patients receiving radiation therapy treatment for left-sided breast cancer have shown increased cardiac morbidity, which is related to the volume of the heart exposed to radiation during treatment. Researchers have been trying to generate specialized treatment methods for left-sided breast cancer radiation therapy to minimize the damage to the heart. Breathing motion causes the heart to move in and out of the radiation field during treatment, which adds to the challenge of effectively and consistently sparing the heart.
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For those of you who are interested in Operations Research applications in finance, there is a workshop coming up in Fields Institute on the topic of financial and risk management.
The focus of this workshop is on developing optimization models that are aimed for practical implementation and use by risk managers at different financial institutions and industrial
enterprises.
The workshop is aimed to bridge the gap between academic research in optimization and practical financial and risk management applications of optimization techniques.
For more information, visit http://www.optimization-in-finance.ca
On August 16 Tuesday afternoon, Erick Delage, an assistant professor from HEC Montréal, is coming to University of Toronto to give a talk in the topics of stochastic programming and distributionally robust optimization. He will present computational, theoretical and empirical evidence that stochastic programming can be valuable even when it is not matched with a particular distribution. He will then review the benefits of using distributionally robust optimization. He will propose tractable methods and show their applications in portfolio selection, vehicle routing, and airline fleet composition problems. Read more...
On August 11 Thursday afternoon, Timothy Chan, an assistant professor from the Mechanical and Industrial Engineering department of University of Toronto will give a talk in the topic of acadmic job searching. The seminar will be of interest to all graduate students who are planning to pursue a career in academics. In his talk, Prof. Chan plans to cover key aspects of the academic job search process such as finding the right job postings, assembling the applications, and navigating the in-person interview. Read more...
2011 Annual Conference of Canadian Operational Research Society (CORS) will be held from May 30 to June 1 in St. John's, Newfoundland.
UTORG have started biweekly OPERATIONS RESEARCH LUNCHES, where students can meet and informally discuss topics in OR and/or mathematics over lunch. This will be a good opportunity to make new friends and learn directly from "student-specialists" in current areas of OR. At every meeting, a volunteer will be chosen to facilitate the discussion. Tentatively, we will meet in the Rosebrugh building Room 207 on WEDNESDAY at NOON (12pm). The upcoming one is about financial engineering (optimization) given by IE PhD student, Jonathan Li, on Oct. 27. All are welcome. Lunches are "brown bag", i.e., bring your own lunch.
