| Spring 2008 UMASS
Amherst Operations Research / Management Science Seminar Series |
Date: Friday, March 28, 2008 Time: 11:00 AM Location: Isenberg School of Management, Room 112 |
| Speaker: Professor Eitan
Bachmat Department of Computer Science Ben-Gurion University (visiting Brandeis University) |
| Biography: Eitan Bachmat is a senior
lecturer at the Computer Science Department at Ben-Gurion University.
His research focuses on performance analysis, mostly of storage systems
and on applied probability. Professor Bachmat received his
Bachelor and Masters
degrees in Mathematics from Hebrew University and his Ph.D (1994) in
Mathematics from M.I.T. After being a Tamarkin Post-Doctoral Fellow at
Brown University, he joined the Computer Science Department at BGU. In
addition to his academic activities, he has served as a consultant for
several companies in the storage industry and is listed as an inventor
on 29 approved U.S. patents. |
| TITLE: Airplane Boarding and
Space-Time Geometry |
| Abstract: It is hard to think of a process
that is more boring than boarding an airplane. In the hope of
relieving, or at least shortening, some of the pain, airlines have
devised various boarding strategies which lead to announcements like
"All passenger from rows 40 and above are now welcome to board the
plane, or more recently, "Zone 1+2 passengers are now welcome to
board", or even unassigned boarding. In the talk we will try to
overturn the negative image that airplane boarding has and will try to
portray it as a very exciting process. We will present an analytical
model for airplane boarding and try to figure out what are the better
strategies. Surprisingly, the model is based on the same math that
models relativity theory. In particular, if time permits, we will use
airplane borading to suggest a nice interpretation for Einstein's law
of motion. The talk is entirely self contained. Partly based on joint
works with D. Berend, L. Sapir, S. Skiena, M. Elkin and V. Khachaturov. |
| 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 |