Fall 2007 UMASS Amherst Operations Research / Management Science Seminar Series

Date: Friday, September 14, 2007 Time: 11:00 AM Location: Isenberg School of Management, Room 112

Speaker: Dr. Brenda Dietrich IBM Fellow Director, Mathematical Sciences IBM T. J. Watson Research Center Yorktown Heights, NY

Biography: Dr. Brenda Dietrich is Director, Mathematical Sciences, at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center. She holds a BS in Mathematics from UNC and an MS and PhD in OR/IE from Cornell. Her research includes manufacturing scheduling, services resource management, transportation logistics, integer programming, and combinatorial duality. She is a member of the Advisory Board of the IE/MS department of Northwestern University, a member of the Industrial Advisory Board for both IMA (Minnesota) and DIMACS (Rutgers), and IBM’s delegate to MIT’s Supply Chain 2020 program. She has participated in numerous INFORMS, Math Programming, SIAM, CLM, and APICS conferences. She holds a dozen patents, has co-authored numerous publications, and co-edited the book Mathematics of the Internet: E-Auction and Markets. 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 INFORMS Practice meetings, and is currently the President of INFORMS. Additionally, she has served on the editorial board of MS&OM and is on the editorial board of Logistics Research Quarterly.

TITLE: Services Science: a New Opportunity for Operations Research

Abstract: As the Services Industry expands, new opportunities for the application of Operations Research models are emerging. This talk will outline some of the opportunities and will discuss some of the challenges of applying traditional OR approaches, particularly those developed for managing the supply chain, to modeling and managing business services.  Some recent IBM projects will be described.

This series is organized by the UMASS Amherst INFORMS Student Chapter. Support for this series is provided by the Isenberg School of Management, the Department of Finance and Operations Management, INFORMS, and the John F. Smith Memorial Fund. For questions, please contact the INFORMS Student Chapter Speaker Series Coordinator, Ms. Trisha Woolley, twoolley@som.umass.edu or the Faculty Advisor, Professor Anna Nagurney.