March 12, 2022
Autumn 2021 Newsletter
DEPARTMENT NEWS | PUBLICATIONS | CONFERENCES
DOCTORAL PROGRAM | MSIS PROGRAM
SEMINAR SERIES
A word from our chair, Yong Tan:
As we welcome 2022 with open arms, I would like to thank the entire ISOM department for their continued hard work to make this department grow and thrive towards greatness. I appreciate everyone’s cooperative spirit in making sure the department continues to thrive and grow.
This autumn quarter we welcomed Jenny as an assistant teaching professor, bringing a love for teaching and great cheer to our undergraduate and MBA courses. We are planning to bring in a couple new faculty to the IS side next year and are currently recruiting for those positions. Many awards were also won during this time, with Elina receiving the Gordon B. Davis Young Scholar Award, Michael and Yong-Pin winning awards for their excellent papers, and Yingfei winning an Amazon award for her research. It is a proud moment to be a part of ISOM.
In short, here’s to a healthy, happy, and successful 2022!
Faculty News:
Uttara Ananthakrishnan presented her paper at CIST 2021, “Examining the Digital Resilience of the Fitness Sector During the COVID-19 Pandemic” (with Jiaoping Chen and Anjana Susarla).
Elina Hwang won the 2021 Gordon B. Davis Young Scholar Award from the INFORMS Information Systems Society. This award focuses on recognizing non-tenured junior scholars who have completed their PhDs between three to six years from this call (Fall 2021). Nominees are to have demonstrated competence in pursuing and executing quality IS research that makes meaningful intellectual contribution to the IS discipline. Congratulations Elina!
Stephanie Lee presented multiple papers at various conferences to date. Most notably, she presented the following works:
- “Social Media Sponsorship: Metrics for Finding the Right Content Creator-Sponsor Matches,” (with Shahryar Doosti and Yong Tan) at Korea University
- “A Nudge to Credible Information as a Countermeasure to Misinformation: Evidence from Twitter,” (with Elina Hwang) at WISE 2021 and CIST 2021
- “Flow of the Game: A Hidden Markov Model of Player Game-Play and Reward Ads Watching Behavior in Online Mobile Games,” (with Jiaying Deng and Yong Tan) at the DSI 2021 Annual Conference
- “We Need Local Media More Than Ever: An Empirical Analysis on the Demand Change for Local Online News During the COVID-19 Outbreak,” (with Lijia Ma and Yong Tan) and “Structural Modeling for Estimating Content Creators Popularity Dynamics: The Case of YouTube Fitness Workout Channels,” (with Maria Mitkina and Yong Tan) at INFORMS
- “Extending the Social Safety Net: Female Labor Supply and Rural Pension Eligibility in Brazil,” (with Gaurav Khanna, Margaret Levy, and Benjamin Thompson) at the National Tax Association’s Annual Conference on Taxation
Stephanie also received the Best Review Award at the INFORMS Data Science Workshop!
Leela Nageswaran gave two invited seminars at the Haas School of Business, UC Berkeley and at the SC Johnson College of Business, Cornell University, along with a talk at INFORMS 2021 on “Offline Returns for Online Retailers via Partnership”.
Michael Wagner presented a few research works at the following spaces:
- “Layering Reinforcement Learning Over Dynamic Programming: Incorporating Human Adjustments,” Amazon Machine Learning Conference, October 4-7, 2021
- “Robust Inventory management via the Limit Theorems of Probability,” West Point, December 2, 2021
- “Data-Driven Profit Estimation Error in the Newsvendor Model,” MIT Data Science Lab, December 10, 2021
Michael also received the Urban Transportation Outstanding Paper Award from the INFORMS Transportation Science and Logistics Society (2021) for the paper, “Crowdsourcing Last-Mile Deliveries,” (with Soraya Fatehi), forthcoming in Manufacturing & Service Operations Management.
Yingfei Wang received an award from the 2021 Amazon Research Awards, a program that provides unrestricted funds and AWS promotional credits to academic researchers investigating research topics to support Amazon’s mission to advance customer-obsessed science. The award is received under Amazon Online Advertising.
Yong-Pin Zhou received awards for two papers at the 2021 INFORMS Conference – his paper, “Delay Information in Virtual Queues: A Large-Scale Field Experiment on a Major Ride-Sharing Platform,” (with Qiuping Yu and Yiming Zhang) was honorable mention in the 2021 INFORMS Behavioral Operations Management Best Working Paper Award, and was co-winner of first place for the 2021 INFORMS Service Science Best Paper Award competition with another paper of his, “Pooling Agents for Customer-Intensive Services,” (with Zhongbin Wang, Luyi Yang, Shiliang Cui, and Sezer Ulku).
Leela Nageswaran (with Alan Scheller-Wolf,), “Queues with Redundancy: Is Waiting for Multiple Lines Fair?”, Manufacturing & Service Operations Management, forthcoming.
Michael Wagner, “Layering Reinforcement Learning over Dynamic Programming: Incorporating Human Adjustments”, Proceedings of Amazon Machine Learning Conference 2021.
Michael Wagner, “A Dynamic Programming Model for Crowdsourced Labor Planning at Amazon Flex”, Proceedings of Amazon Consumer Science Summer 2021.
Yong-Pin Zhou (with Zhongbin Wang, Luyi Wang, Shiliang Cui, and Sezer Ulku), “Pooling Agents for Customer-Intensive Services”, accepted on October 19, 2021 for publication in Operations Research.
With the reopening of states and conferences slowly returning to in person, ISOM faculty and students were busy with presentations this quarter. Stephanie Lee participated in many conferences as more than just a presenter, however – she was a session chair at the INFORMS Annual Conference (session title: “Social Media Analytics: New Techniques and Applications”), an associate editor for the International Conference on Information Systems (ICIS), and was a program committee member for the Conference on Information Systems and Technology (CIST), KrAIS Workshop, and INFORMS Data Science Workshop.
Ming Fan served as the co-chair of the Workshop on Information Systems and Economics (WISE) in December 2021 at Austin, TX. WISE is one of the premier workshops in information systems.
We have three new PhD students joining our department – one in Information Systems and two in Operations Management:
Xiaoxuan Hou is a first year Operations Management student, joining us after working in the private sector at Energy and Environmental Economics Inc. She received her masters from UC Berkeley and her bachelors from Peking University.
Xingchen ‘Cedric’ Xu is a first year Information Systems student, joining us after receiving his bachelors from Tsinghua University.
Haonan Zhang is a first year Operations Management student, joining us after completing his masters from Northwestern University and his bachelors from the University of Sydney.
One of our doctoral students, Yu ‘Rain’ Kan, presented her work, “Impact of ML-based Taste Clusters on Sales Diversity,” (with Uttara Ananthakrishnan and Yong Tan) at the Conference on Digital Experimentation @ MIT (CODE@MIT) and the Workshop on Information Systems and Economics (WISE) 2021.
On Saturday, November 20, the MSIS program hosted our Women in Tech Brunch with a focus on advancing women in the ever-growing cyber industry. We welcomed the MSIS and larger Seattle-tech community to hear from an impressive panel of security leaders, including: Eva Benn, Senior Engineering Program Manager, Microsoft; Jessica Ferguson, Deputy CISO, Docusign; Dina Nichols, Director, Security Operations Detection & Response, Salesforce; Divya Jeyachandran, Senior Director, Coalfire; and Shanchita Das, Director, PwC.
Our panelists shared their unique journeys in the field, giving participants insight into the importance of leading with authenticity, being willing to learn and take risks, and seizing every opportunity that arises within cybersecurity. After the panel, the community engaged in a lively brunch with intimate conversations about their own experiences as women and allies in technology. With this event, we hoped to inspire and connect future cybersecurity leaders interested in pursuing the field as it continues to grow as a critical necessity for all companies.
October 8, 2021
Luyi Yang
University of California, Berkeley
Operations Management
Talk title: Right to Repair: Pricing, Welfare, and Environmental Implication
November 5, 2021
Chiwei Yan
University of Washington
Industrial & Systems Engineering
Talk title: Randomized FIFO Mechanisms
November 12, 2021
James Siderius
MIT
Information Systems
Talk title: Strategic Reviews
November 19, 2021
Wanning Chen
Stanford University
Information Systems
Talk title: Learning To Recommend Using Non-Uniform Data
November 23, 2021
Amandeep Singh
University of Pennsylvania
Information Systems
Talk title: Network Externalities and Cross-Platform App Development in Mobile Platforms
November 30, 2021
Wen Wang
Carnegie Mellon University
Information Systems
Talk title: Deep Reinforcement Learning for Sequential Targeting
December 3, 2021
Wenjia Ba
Stanford University
Information Systems
Talk title: Sales Policies for a Virtual Assistant
University of Washington
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ISOM Department
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(206) 543-1043 | disom@uw.edu
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