Invited plenary speakers
There will be 4 invited plenary speakers:
Sergiu HART
The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel.
Sergiu Hart is the Kusiel-Vorreuter University Professor, Professor of
Mathematics, and Professor of Economics at the Hebrew University of
Jerusalem. He received a Ph.D. in Mathematics and Statistics from Tel Aviv
University in 1976. His previous academic appointments were at Stanford
University, Tel Aviv University, and Harvard University. From 1991 to
1998 Sergiu Hart was the Founding Director of the Center for the Study of
Rationality, a world-leading multidisciplinary research center at the
Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He was elected Fellow of the Econometric
Society in 1984 and Member of the Israel Academy of Sciences and
Humanities in 2006. In 1998 he received the Rothschild Prize. He has
served as President of the Israel Mathematical Union, and is currently
Vice President of the Game Theory Society. The main area of research of
Sergiu Hart is game theory and economic theory; additional contributions
are in mathematics, computer science, probability and statistics, and
finance.
Sergiu Hart's homepage.
Title: "Dynamics, Heuristics, and Equilibria: A Game-Theoretic Perspective"
Abstract: An overview of some recent work on dynamical systems in multi-player
environments: On the one hand, there are simple adaptive heuristics --
such as "regret matching" -- that lead in the long run to correlated
equilibria, a concept that embodies full rationality. On the other hand,
the natural informational restriction that each participant does not know
the payoff functions of the other participants -- "uncoupledness" --
severely limits the possibilities to converge to Nash equilibria.
Connections to behavioral economics, neurobiological studies, and
cognitive radio, will also be mentioned.
Jean MAIRESSE
LIAFA
Université Paris Diderot, Paris 7, France.
Jean Mairesse obtained the Engineer degree from Ecole Polytechnique, France, in 1991, and from Ecole Nationale de la Statistique et de l'Administration Economique, France, in 1993. He received the Docteur en Sciences degree in Applied Mathematics from Ecole Polytechnique in 1995. Since 1996, he has been working for CNRS, now with the grade of Directeur de Recherche. His laboratory is LIAFA (Laboratoire d'Informatique et d'Algorithmique: Fondements et Applications), Université Paris 7, France. His main reseach interests are discrete event systems, combinatorial (semi)group theory, and random walks on algebraic structures.
Jean Mairesse's homepage.
Title: "Random walks on algebraic structures and discrete event systems"
Abstract: We study several models of Discrete Event Systems from which emerges the notion of random walks on groups or semigroups. First example, stochastic event graphs which correspond to random walks on semigroups of max-plus matrices. Second example, Tetris heap models which correspond to random walks on partially commutative groups or semigroups. Last example, zero-automatic queues which are markovian queues with a buffering mechanism evolving like a random walk on some infinite group. We are interested in the performance evaluation of these different models with a focus on getting explicit computational results.
Avishai (Avi) MANDELBAUM
William Davidson Faculty of Industrial Engineering and Management
Technion - Israel Institute of Technology,
Haifa, Israel.
http://ie.technion.ac.il/serveng
Prof. Avishai (Avi) Mandelbaum has a B.Sc. in Mathematics and Computer Science and an M.A. in Statistics, both summa cum laude from Tel-Aviv University. His Ph.D. is in Operations Research, from Cornell University. After graduation, in 1983, he joined the Graduate School of Business at Stanford University. He left the U.S.A., in 1991, to assume a position at the Technion, the Faculty of Industrial Engineering and Management (IEM). This faculty, as well as his current interests, constitute a convex-hull of all the areas that he has been in volved with.
At the Technion, Prof. Mandelbaum has been teaching courses in probability, stochastic processes and service engineering. In IE&M, he served as the coordinator of IE&M graduate studies and was the Associate Dean for Research; he is a past member of the Technion Academic Development Committee and a present member of the Prize committee of the Applied Probability Society. Since 1995, he has been the faculty advisor for IE&M outstanding students.
Prof. Mandelbaum's teaching has been acknowledged by the Technion Mani Award for Excellence in Teaching, 1999; the Technion Excellence in Teaching Award, 2000 (for the course Service Engineering); and the inaugural Meir Rosenblatt Prize for teaching, 2004. His research contributions have been acknowledged by the ORSIS Yosef Levy prize, 2001; the Mitchner Prize for Quality Sciences and Qaulity Management, 2003; and the inaugural Markov Lecture of the Applied Probability Society , INFORM 2005
Avishai Mandelbaum's homepage
Title: "QED Queues: Quality- and Efficiency-Driven Call Centers"
Abstract: Through examples of Service Operations, with a focus on Telephone
Call Centers, I review empirical findings that motivate or are
motivated by (or both) interesting research questions. These
findings give rise to features that are prerequisites for useful
service models, for example customers' (im)patience, time-varying
demand, heterogeneity of customers and servers, over-dispersion in
Poisson arrivals, generally-distributed (as opposed to exponential)
service- and patience-durations, and more. Empirical analysis also
enables validation of existing models and protocols, either
supporting or refuting their relevance and robustness.
The mathematical framework for my models is asymptotic queueing
theory, where limits are taken as the number of servers increases
indefinitely, in a way that maintains a delicate balance against the
offered-load. Asymptotic analysis reveals an operational regime that
achieves, under already moderate scale, remarkably high levels of
both service quality and efficiency. This is the QED
Regime, discovered by Erlang and characterized by Halfin & Whitt.
(QED = Quality- and Efficiency-Driven).
My main data-source is a unique repository of call-centers data,
designed and maintained at the Technion's SEE Laboratory (SEE
= Service Enterprise Engineering). The data is unique in that it is
transaction-based: it details the individual operational
history of all the calls handled by the participating call centers.
(For example, one source of data is a network of 4 call centers of a
U.S. bank, spanning 2.5 years and covering about 1000 agents; there
are 218,047,488 telephone calls overall, out of which 41,646,142
where served by agents, while the rest were handled by answering
machines.) To support data analysis, a universal data-structure and
a friendly interface have been developed, under the logo DataMOCCA = Data MOdels for Call Centers Analysis. (I shall
have with me DataMOCCA DVD's for academic distribution).
Background Reading
Gans, N., Koole, G., Mandelbaum, A. "Telephone Call Centers: Tutorial, Review and Research
Prospects."
Invited review paper by Manufacturing and Service Operations Management (M&SOM), 5 (2), 79141, 2003.
http://iew3.technion.ac.il/serveng/References/Gans-Koole-Mandelbaum-CCReview.pdf
Brown, L., Gans, N., Mandelbaum, A., Sakov, A., Zeltyn, S., Zhao, L. and Haipeng, S.
"Statistical Analysis of a Telephone Call Center : A
Queueing-Science Perspective." Journal of the American Statistical
Association (JASA), 100, 36-50, 2005.
http://iew3.technion.ac.il/serveng/References/JASA_callcenter.pdf
John TSITSIKLIS
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Cambridge, MA, U.S.A.
John N. Tsitsiklis received the B.S. degree in Mathematics (1980), and the B.S. (1980), M.S. (1981) and Ph.D. (1984) degrees in Electrical Engineering, all from M.I.T., where he is currently a Clarence J Lebel Professor of Electrical Engineering. He has also served as a co-director of the MIT Operations Research Center (2002-5).
His research interests are in the fields of systems, optimization, communications, control, and operations research. He has coauthored four books and more than a hundred journal papers in these areas. His awards include an Outstanding Paper Award by the IEEE Control Systems Society (1986), the M.I.T. Edgerton Faculty Achievement Award (1989), the Bodossakis Foundation Prize (1995), and the INFORMS/CSTS prize (1997). He is a Fellow of IEEE and INFORMS, a member of the National Academy of Engineering, and has been a member of the National Council on Research and Technology in Greece.
John Tsistiklis homepage.
Title: "Gossiping, Herding, Flocking, and Consensus"
Abstract: Motivated by a variety of contexts, including distributed optimization, multiagent coordination, economics, sociology, and animal behavior, there has been much recent activity on consensus algorithms whereby a set of agents keep forming convex combinations of their own tentative decisions with those of their neighbors. We overview the history of such methods, application contexts, and results on convergence and speed of convergence to a common decision.
|
