Autumn 2019 Newsletter

It was a busy autumn quarter, with the start of the new school year and Seattle hosting the INFORMS annual meeting this year. Amid the hustle and bustle, a few of our faculty were invited to give talks:

Foad Iravani was invited by the Yale School of Management, presenting his research: “A Reduce-to-Threshold Approach to Direct Load Control Contracts with Monthly Constraints”.

Michael Wagner was invited by the USC Viterbi School of Engineering in November to present joint research with Andy Siegel, “Profit Estimation Error in the Newsvendor Model”.

Shi Chen was invited in October to give seminar talks at the McDonough School of Business at Georgetown University and the Tepper School of Business at Carnegie Mellon University.

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Faculty publications:
Shi Chen, Qinqin Zhang, Yong-Pin Zhou, “Impact of Supply Chain Transparency on Sustainability under NGO Scrutiny”. Production and Operations Management, 28(12), 3002-3022.

Forthcoming publications:
Michael Wagner, “Crowdvoting Judgment: An Analysis of Modern Peer Review,” Stochastic Systems, forthcoming 2019.

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Apurva Jain attended the CSCMP EDGE Conference, held September 15 – 18 in Anaheim, CA. This conference connects industry professionals and academics so they can learn from each other and advance supply chain education.

Elina Hwang attended and presented research at the Carnegie Conference in Honor of James Gardner March, held October 4 – 5 in Pittsburgh, PA. Researches from around the world came together to celebrate the life and research contributions of Dr. Jim March, focusing on topics central to his work: organizational learning, decision making, search, exploration versus exploitation, and the use models in organization science.

INFORMS Annual Meeting and the Conference on Information Systems and Technology (CIST) were held in Seattle October 19 – 23, bringing together thousands of members to connect, network, and learn from each other. Not only did many of the ISOM faculty and doctoral students present original research, they were also heavily involved in the preparation and organization of these major conferences.

At INFORMS 2019, Ted Klastorin was the Program Chair; Michael Wagner co-chaired the Poster (Interactive) Sessions; and Hamed Mamani, Foad Iravani, and Elina Hwang co-chaired various sponsored clusters (Manufacturing and Service Operations Management, MSOM – Sustainable Operations, and Information Systems, respectively).

For a full list of papers presented at INFORMS 2019 by our faculty and students, click here.

At CIST 2019, Ming Fan and Uttara Ananthakrishnan were a part of the Organizing Committee; Yong Tan was on the Best Conference Paper Award Committee; and Uttara Ananthakrishnan, Lin Hao, Shan Huang, Yingfei Wang, Elina Hwang, and Stephanie Lee were members of the Program Committee.

For a full list of papers presented at CIST 2019 by our faculty and students, click here.

Many of our faculty and students were also session chairs, moderators, and panelists during the conference: Ted Klastorin (“Joint Session PMS/ED: Transforming a Project Management Course”, “Joint Session Education/Project Management: Teaching Project Management”, “Health System Innovation: Analytics in Action”, “Structural Econometric Models”), Yong Tan (“Business Management in Big Data Era”), Yong-Pin Zhou (“Empirical Research on Workforce Management”), Michael Wagner (“Crowdfunding”), Shan Huang (“Economic Value of Digital Platforms and Artificial Intelligence”), Foad Iravani (“Agriculture and Food Supply Chain”), Soraya (Nadia) Fatehi (“Crowdsourcing Platforms”), and Emisa Nategh (“Joint Session HAS/Practice Curated: Data-Driven Models for Healthcare Applications”, “Data Mining and Machine Learning in Healthcare”).

A couple of our faculty also won awards during the conference: Yong-Pin Zhou (with Masoud Kamalahmadi and Qiuping Yu) placed 3^rd in the 2019 INFORMS Service Science Best Paper Award with their paper “Call to Duty: Just-in-time Scheduling in a Restaurant Chain”, and Mingwen Yang was the INFORMS ISS Nunamaker-Chen Dissertation Award Runner Up for 2019. Congratulations to them both!

Ming Fan attended and was a program organizing co-chair for the Workshop on e-Business (WeB), held on December 14 in Munich, Germany. While in Munich, he also attended the International Conference on Information Systems (ICIS), held from December 15 – 18, and the Workshop on Information Technologies and Systems (WITS), held from December 18 – 20. At ICIS 2019, Mingwen Yang was a Best Reviewer Nominee.

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Every autumn, ISOM holds a PhD lunchtime research seminar series where first- and second-year students meet with faculty over lunch and hear about what research is being done at Foster, along with discussions about life as a PhD student and related topics. These seminars are meant to better match research interests and needs between faculty and students and help guide the students on their new path.

Two of our recent graduates, Behnaz Ghahestani Bojd and Kyung Sun (Melissa) Rhee passed their final exams on December 4, 2019 and December 6, 2019, respectively – Behnaz presented “Essays on Gamified Online Platforms”, and Melissa presented “Essays on the Economics of Digital Markets”. Behnaz is currently an assistant professor at the Paul Merage School of Business at UC Irvine, and Melissa is an assistant professor at the Warrington College of Business at the University of Florida.

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The USTC-UW Institute for Global Business and Finance Innovation organized the 2019 Workshop on FinTech and Management Innovation, held at the UW Foster Business School from October 18 – 20. There were 37 talks, with several world-renowned scholars invited to discuss their insights on the emerging FinTech industry and its impacts on research, businesses, and innovation. The USTC-UW Institute for Global Business and Finance Innovation was jointly established by the USTC School of Management and the Michael G. Foster School of Business, University of Washington to promote collaborative research and academic exchanges.

Several of the ISOM faculty and doctoral students contributed to the workshop itinerary – Ming Fan, Yong Tan, Shi Chen, Kamran Moinzadeh, and Yong-Pin Zhou participated as moderators of various sessions, and below are some of the talks that were presented:

• Ming Fan, “Sponsored Advertising Meets Recommender System at an Online Platform”
• Kamran Moinzadeh, “New Research Opportunities in Cloud Computing and Beyond”
• Yong Tan and Juan Qin, “A Small Solution to Rush-Hour Traffic Congestion: Effects of Dockless Bike-Sharing Entry on Ride-Sharing”
• Yong-Pin Zhou and Yiming Zhang, “Delay Information on a Ride-Sharing Platform: A Large-Scale Field Experiment”
• Shi Chen and Junfei Lei, “The Supply Contracts under Price Uncertainty”

This past year, USTC spent time recruiting for faculty positions at the Academy of Management (AOM) Annual Meeting 2019 (August 9 – 13 in Boston, MA), the INFORMS Annual Meeting 2019 (October 20 – 23 in Seattle, WA), and the American Accounting Association (AAA) 2019 Accounting PhD Rookie Recruiting and Research Camp (December 6 – 8 in Miami, FL). The recruiters were: Yong Tan, Yugang Yu, Xiaoping Chen, Zhijian Cui, Quan Zheng, Sun Can, Yutian Li, Shaohui Wu, Menghai Gao, and Yongfeng Wei.

14 students enrolled in the 2019 USTC-UW Joint PhD program.

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The Foster School of Business Master of Science in Information Systems program had an exciting Autumn 2019 quarter! On Saturday, October 16^th, MSIS hosted the first annual Women in Tech Brunch: Leading Disruptive Innovation. MSIS students, alumni, faculty, and the greater Seattle Tech community came together to discuss how to disrupt, empower, and lead in the changing world of technology.

Uttara Ananthakrishnan, Assistant Professor of Information Systems, kicked off the event with a dynamic welcoming speech and introduction of our keynote speakers, Keela Robison, VP of Product Innovation at Netflix, and Sandy Carter, VP of Windows and Enterprise Workloads at AWS. Robison informed our crowd about the importance of decision making for disruptive innovation, and Carter spoke about how customer obsession drives innovation.  

To read more about the Women in Tech Brunch, you can visit the MSIS blog here.   

The MSIS program looks forward to sharing more opportunities with the community and taking steps to amplify the impact of women in the technology industry! 

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MSCM welcomed 40 students to campus this past summer. We have a robust group with experience spanning industries such as oil and energy, government, consumer products, financial services, manufacturing and technology. So far, MSCM students have participated in company visits to Amazon and Microsoft Cybersecurity offices, and the program has hosted over ten industry guest speakers in the classroom.

Students have exemplified Husky pride by participating in school wide events such as the annual Dawg Dash and the homecoming football game and tailgate alongside MSCM alumni and MSBA students. Our students have also represented MSCM outside of the UW community with participation in the CSCMP EDGE conference and the Regional ASCM Deloitte Case Competition. The MSCM student team of four will compete in the case competition finals in San Francisco in February 2020.

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September 27, 2019
Junming Yin
University of Arizona
Information Systems

Talk title: Towards Better Learning from Crowd Labeling: A Variational Bayesian Approach

October 4, 2019
Ruxian Wang
Johns Hopkins University
Operations Management

Talk title: Consumer Choice and Market Expansion: Modeling, Optimization and Estimation

October 18, 2019
Zixuan (Maggie) Meng
University of Washington – PhD
Information Systems

Talk title: The Influence of Self-Regulation of Sharing Economy: Evidence from Unstructured Data

October 25, 2019
Ersin Korpeoglu
University College London
Operations Management

Talk title: Parallel Innovation Contests

November 8, 2019
Pnina Feldman
Boston University
Operations Management

Talk title: Pricing Capacity Over Time and Recourse Strategies: Facilitate Reselling, Offer Refunds/Options, or Overbook?

November 15, 2019
Soraya (Nadia) Fatehi
University of Washington – PhD
Operations Management

Talk title: Crowdsourcing Last-Mile Deliveries

November 22, 2019
Yan Huang
Carnegie Mellon University
Information Systems

Talk title: Crowds, Lending, Machines, and Bias

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