Images of graduation
Congratulations to Feng Liu, Ying Chen, Ukesh Chawal, Dishita Mehtalia, Gazi md daud Iqbal, and all of our IMSE graduates!
-Posted by Jay Rosenberger
Congratulations to IMSE Graduates
COSMOS
INFORMS Video
The Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS) has released a new video: “O.R. & Analytics: Saving Lives, Saving Money, Solving Problems.”
-Updated by Jay Rosenberger
USA Science & Engineering Festival
UT Arlington graduate students Shirish Rao and Hadis Anahideh from Industrial Engineering, Hoda Rahimi from Civil Engineering, and Takuma Mitani from Architecture were awarded a People, Prosperity and the Planet (P3) Phase I grant from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Pictured below are Takuma, Hoda, Hadis, and Shirish.
This student competition grant provided funding to showcase their research using decision analytics in green building design at the EPA’s 14th Annual National Sustainable Design Expo. The UT Arlington student team and IMSE faculty mentor Victoria Chen participated in the expo, which was held April 7-8 at the 2018 USA Science & Engineering Festival in Washington, DC.
Their exhibit, entitled Better Buildings for Sustainability, included hands-on activities, software demonstrations, and Takuma’s own balsa wood building model.
About 500 kids and adults kept them busy at their booth. Kids were challenged to build a stable structure with toothpicks and mini-marshmallows, and the best structures were kept on display at the booth.
Dishita Mehtalia Awarded COSMOS Scholarship
The Center on Stochastic Modeling, Optimization, & Statistics (COSMOS) awarded Ms. Dishita Mehtalia the 2018 COSMOS Scholarship. Dishita will be graduating this semester with a Masters in IE. She has been assisting IMSE Professor Victoria Chen and IMSE Ph.D. students Khan Haque and Li Zhang on research on prediction-led policing. Their work uses 911 call data from the Arlington, TX Police Department, and Dishita has spent countless hours processing and analyzing these data for building crime rate prediction models to be used within a discrete-event simulation studying dynamic policing strategies. At the IMSE Awards Banquet below, Dishita is in the center surrounded by COSMOS faculty (from left to right) Bill Corley, Shouyi Wang, Aera LeBoulluec, Victoria Chen, Jay Rosenberger, and Chen Kan.
-Posted by Victoria Chen and Jay Rosenberger
The IMSE Dept. Celebrates the Fourth Annual Awards Banquet
The Industrial, Manufacturing and Systems Engineering Department hosted the 4th Annual Awards Banquet to honor graduating students as well as outstanding undergraduate and graduate students with awards and scholarships on Thursday, April 28th at 6pm in the Nedderman Hall Rady Room. The approximately 100 guests included the faculty, staff and members of the advisory board. All guests enjoyed a formal, catered dinner. The wonderful evening concluded with a few brief comments from our graduating seniors and a final congratulation to award winners and graduates of the past year. Below are the six scholarships and names of awarded students.
The G. T. Stevens, Jr. Endowed Alumni Scholarship which was established in 1998 to honor the IMSE Department’s former Chair is awarded to outstanding Industrial Enginnering students. Dr. Stevens passed away this year therefore his children Mr. Bob Stevens and Ms. Bartlett Barry presented the scholarships. This year’s recipients were Ms. Tyka Do (Senior), Ms. Jasmine Lucero (Senior), Mr. Anoop Kulkarni (Graduate) and Mr. Alexander Thomas (Graduate).
The Keith and Carolyn Weiss Industrial Engineering Scholarship, which is given to deserving Industrial Engineering undergraduate students who are working to support their education. This year’s awardee is a senior, Ms. Griselda Sanchez.
The Weiss Family Endowed Scholarship is an award distributed by the UT Arlington Alumni Association to award a junior or senior undergraduate who have been working to support their education. This year’s recipient is senior Mr. Joshua Bolton.
The John and Pat Priest Family Endowed Scholarship is awarded to Industrial Engineering undergraduate students that have an interest in manufacturing. This year we have two awardees, Mr. Patrick Coursey and Ms. Mary Rangel.
The RFID and Auto ID Labs Outstanding Research Scholarship recognizes students conducting outstanding research in RAID Labs. This year’s recipients were Ms. Mary Rangel (Undergraduate), Ms. Isra Elamin (Graduate) and Mr. Raghavendra Punugu(Graduate).
The newest scholarship, The COSMOS Scholarship recognizes a student for his/her voluntary contribution to COSMOS research. This year’s awardee is Mr. Rajesh Sugumar.
Dr. Li Zeng’s Last Day
After serving our department as an Assistant Professor for the past five years, Dr. Li Zeng will be leaving UT Arlington. During her time at UT Arlington, she was very involved in COSMOS (Center on Stochastic Modeling, Optimization, and Statistics). Her research focused on statistical modeling, applied statistics and analysis and control of complex manufacturing processes. She also taught classes on Engineering Probability, Applied Regression Analysis, and Statistical Process Control. We wish her all the best in her future endeavors and career.
New Ph.D Graduate Will Return Home and Find Solutions
A few years ago, Na Wang found problems in her career as a mechanical engineer in China. Now, Dr. Na Wang finds solutions through Industrial Engineering.
I am from the middle part of China. I received my Bachelors degree in Mechanical Engineering from the North China University of Water Resources and Electric Power. I received my Masters degree in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Science and Technology in Beijing. After graduation, I worked as a mechanical design engineer and was responsible for designing various types of equipment for a cold rolling production line.
Gradually, I felt there were some inefficiencies in the production line. However, I didn’t realize the root cause behind the inefficient phenomena at that time.
With my preliminary research, I found that studying Industrial Engineering would improve the inefficiencies.
Thus, I started my Ph.D study at UT Arlington’s IMSE department. After over four years of studying optimization under the supervision of Dr. Jay Rosenberger, I have learned the knowledge to make improvements in different applications. I have applied the knowledge in air traffic flow and pain management problems.
I will definitely miss the lovely environment in the IMSE department, and I will keep these precious memories forever.
My research interest is in statistical analysis, building prediction models, and optimization of MILP and MINLP models. I really enjoyed studying in the COSMOS Lab in the Industrial, Manufacturing, and Systems Engineering Department. My advisor, Dr. Jay Rosenberger, taught me so much. He is so knowledgeable and creative. In the past four years, his outstanding guidance made me feel that I was on a pleasant journey. I also learned a lot from Dr. Chen, Dr. Zeng, Dr. Corley, and Dr. Wang.
Other staff members in the IMSE department, like Julie, Kim and Richard always offered their help when I needed it. After finishing my Ph.D degree, I am planning to move back to China to be with my family.
Written by Na Wang
Na Wang graduated from the Industrial, Manufacturing, and Systems Engineering Department at the University of Texas at Arlington in May 2015 with a Ph.D in Industrial Engineering.
COE Thanks Dr. Chen with Reception
The College of Engineering hosted a reception in honor of Dr. Victoria Chen to thank her for her two-year service as the Interim Chair of the IMSE Department. Dr. Chen stepped in as the Interim Chair in 2012 when Dr. Don Liles retired as the chairperson. The IMSE Department hired Dr. Paul Componation as the new Chair in July. Under Dr. Chen’s leadership, the department has grown in the number of students enrolled and in the amount of research funding received. Current and former students, along with faculty, staff, and Dr. Chen’s family attended the reception on July 18. It was held in The University Club on the the campus of The University of Texas at Arlington.
Photos of the event can be viewed on the IMSE Department’s Facebook photo album: Dr. Chen Thank You Reception.
Featured Alumni: Piyush Kumar, Ph.D.
I came to UT Arlington to pursue my master’s in August 2007 in Industrial Engineering. I was a life-long student having never worked in the industry, so it was not a very big jump to go from B.Tech to a master’s and then on to a Ph.D. which I completed in December 2013. The operations research courses attracted me the most in my master’s, especially the ones taught by Dr. Corley, Dr. Rosenberger, and Dr. Chen. Even though I made some B’s, I had a lot of fun learning some amazing mathematics and statistics.
As a part of my master’s, I undertook research projects under Dr. Jay Rosenberger which gave me my first exposure to Ph.D. level research. The projects were done by previous students in the Center On Stochastic Modeling, Optimization, & Statistics (COSMOS) . My first impression of joining the COSMOS lab was when I peeked through the door and found that Spock from Star Trek was looking straight at me, disapprovingly. I started smiling when I realized it was only a life-sized replica. I was relieved to see that even though I was jumping into some serious research, there was still an element of humor to lighten the somber mood of the lab. Even though, quite frustratingly, when my own lack of knowledge and ignorance was brought into sharp focus, I looked at those times as a great learning opportunity. I worked on a nurse optimization project which was entering the testing stage at HEB hospital. After my master’s, I joined the Ph.D. program as a natural extension to my research work. Around that time, Dr. Anjomani came to Dr. Rosenberger for optimization of urban planning. The problem was to choose which would be the best land use to assign any given land piece. Each land piece would be given a certain rating regarding various land uses, e.g., high residential, low industrial, open areas, etc. It was a simple assignment optimization problem. We tried to use the methodology that was used for nurse optimization for urban planning optimization, but we hit a block which did not allow us to make any progress due to symmetry issues.
Given that we recognized we would not be able to make progress in the research in the direction we were headed, we decided to switch directions. I extended the simple land use optimization problems with more constraints by taking into account urban sprawl. After literature review, I recognized that urban sprawl had a lot of research towards solving it but there were not many comprehensive optimization models. So, the next step was to construct a mathematical model which would address all the various factors contributing towards urban sprawl. After the model was constructed, it was so large that CPLEX, an optimization software, would not even accept the model. It allowed us to experiment with Benders Decomposition method to reduce the model size and allow us to solve the model.
I also worked as a teaching assistant for the IMSE Department when I joined the master’s program. I sincerely enjoyed my time at UT Arlington since it gave me an opportunity to try a variety of things, e.g., salsa, yoga, aikido, etc.
I am currently working as a software engineer for E2open as their optimization specialist.
Written by Piyush Kumar, Ph.D. Industrial Engineering
IMSE Alumni 2013
Featured Alumni: Dr. Kaushik Gorahava
Some of you may remember Kaushik Gorahava from his time at UT Arlington as a student and a teaching assistant. Below is his reflection on his research and experience at UT Arlington:
I completed my Ph.D. from the Industrial & Manufacturing Systems Engineering department at The University of Texas at Arlington in summer 2013. After having worked as an Industrial Engineer in India’s manufacturing industry for more than three years, I came to the USA in August 2007 to pursue further studies. I completed my M.S. in Industrial Engineering degree in 2009 and took many advanced Statistics, Optimization, and Mathematical Modeling courses in the Industrial Engineering and Mathematics department, respectively.
As a project in the Stochastic Processes course, I reviewed and analyzed a Stochastic Model for using Ring Vaccination for smallpox control. The project was well received in the class and motivated me to pursue further research at the interface of Systems Science and Epidemiology. Under the guidance of my mentors, I developed my broad research area, optimization in neglected public health issues, for my Ph.D. dissertation. In fall 2009, I started my Ph.D. in the Center On Stochastic, Modeling, Optimization, and Statistics (COSMOS) laboratory, under the guidance of Dr. Jay Rosenberger, an expert in Optimization. I was also mentored by my dissertation co-adviser, Dr. Anuj Mubayi, an applied mathematical scientist working at the intersection of epidemiology and social networks.
Being from India, a developing country, I had observed first-hand the suffering caused by disease and poverty. I noticed an urgent need for improvement in public health policies, especially the basic ones. I chose to work on improving one of the basic control measures for a neglected infectious disease, Leishmaniasis, which mostly affects poverty stricken communities and is the second deadliest vector-borne disease in the world. Leishmaniasis spreads to humans by the bite of an infected sandfly. Bihar’s Public Health Department has limited financial resources and can spray insecticide at a limited number of sites. My research aimed to address questions on optimal insecticide allocation for conducting a spray campaign. My dissertation research involved building and analyzing optimization models. The mathematical models were built by considering factors affecting disease transmission and metrics to help the Public Health Department make better decisions. The results of my dissertation study recommended an improved and long-lasting insecticide spray campaign policy for Bihar’s Public Health Department.
I also enjoyed training and teaching individuals, a set of skills which I acquired through my experience as a Teaching Assistant at the Industrial Engineering department during my doctoral studies. During my graduate studies, I mentored some undergraduate and master’s students. I am an independent researcher now and aim to work at the interface of System Dynamics Engineering and Medical Sciences.
Written by Dr. Kaushik Gorahava
IMSE Alumni
Dr. Gorahava graduated in 2013 with a PhD in Industrial Engineering and currently works as a Systems Analyst for Horizon Technologies Inc.
Industrial, Manufacturing, and Systems Engineering (IMSE) Department 