| REEF research professor Vladimir Boginski has won the Young Investigator Award from the Department of Defense (Defense Threat Reduction Agency) for his proposal "New Robustness Characteristics and Phase Transition Problems for Complex Networks in Dynamic and Uncertain Environments." |
2009-2010 Undergraduate Engineering Scholarships: Industrial and Systems Engineering.
Name: Scholarship
Joanna Sandford: Dean´s Scholarship
Eduardo Fleisher: Dean´s Scholarship
Jennifer Fernandez: Cunningham Scholarship
Diego Soto: Cunningham Scholarship
Salomon Horowitz: Snelling Scholarship
Pierina Moreno Drexler: Hunter Scholarship
Kevin Walsh: Pound Scholarship
Andres Scharifker: Pound Scholarship
Esther Benchimol: Goodrum Scholarship
David Askaryan: Collins Scholarship
Ezequiei Haiac: Fulton Scholarship
Marcelo Rusconi: General Engineering Scholarship |
| College Of Engineering Scholarship for Increased Participation in Combined B.S.-M.S. Engineering Degree. Please check scholarship section for details. | Daniel McFadden, Industrial and Systems Engineering, University of Florida received a $2,500 scholarship from the National Academy for Nuclear Training for the academic year 2009-2010. |
| Adjunct research professor Terry Rockafellar delivered a keynote address entitled "Approaches to Risk in Optimization Under Uncertainty" at the
2009 Industrial Engineering Research Conference in Miami. | J. Cole Smith was named Associate Editor for Operations Research in the area of Telecommunications and a Departmental Editor for IIE Transactions in the area of Emerging Applications for the focused issue of Operations Engineering and Analysis. |
| Joseph P. Geunes and J. Cole Smith served as co-chairs of the Industrial Engineering Research Conference, part of the Institute of Industrial Engineers national conference held in June, 2009 in Miami, Florida. The conference boasted over 1300 attendees and 20 research tracks. |
| J. Cole Smith was named the winner of the Institute of Industrial Engineers, Operations Research Division Teaching Award at the 2009 Conference in Miami, Florida. Dr. Smith taught Operations Research at the undergraduate level, Deterministic Methods of Operations Research and Linear Programming and Network Flows at the graduate level this past year. |
| Emeritus Professor and current AFOSR (Air Force Office of Scientific Research) program director Donald Hearn delivered a keynote address at the Industrial Engineering Research Conference in Miami, Florida in June of 2009.
| ISE Academic Coordinator Michael Funk has received a College of Engineering Advising Award for 2006-2007. |
| Dick and Carolyn Patterson recently endowed the Patterson Graduate Fellowship in Industrial and Systems Engineering by making a $25,000 donation to the UF Foundation. Dick Patterson was on the ISE faculty in the 1960s and supervised the first ISE PhD graduate, Mario Padron, who graduated in 1969. Shortly afterwards Dick joined the faculty at the University of Michigan. After his retirement in the mid 1990s, the Pattersons returned to Gainesville and he again taught in the Department. Since their return Carolyn has been active as a member and officer of the UF Women´s Club. First award of the fellowship is planned for spring, 2006. |
| Ravindra K. Ahuja was named a finalist for a 2007 IIE curriculum innovation award by the CIEADH (Council of Industrial Engineering Academic Department Heads) Innovations in Curriculum Award Committee. Professor Ahuja´s curriculum innovations come in the area of integrating decision support systems into industrial engineering curricula. |
| Researchers from the University of Florida (UF; Gainesville) are hoping that variety is the component that keeps neurostimulation alive. They have developed a technology called variational neurostimulation, which may prevent the body from adapting to and resisting stimulation therapy.
“We think that the brain and the seizure focus are smart and find ways around stimulation,” says Basim Uthman, MD, associate professor of neurology at UF. “Although it may sound counterintuitive, the [brain’s] normal activity is chaotic and random. Seizure activity is more of a synchronous activity—it’s very organized.”
The researchers compare the body’s resistance to stimulation with patients who take antibiotics in the hospital. “When you use certain antibiotics, after a while, they’re not effective,” says Uthman. “The bacteria change and because of the environment, they make adjustments so that they won’t be killed by the
antibiotics.”
In order to fool the brain, the researchers have designed a scheme in which no particular stimulus is the same as the previous one. By altering the electrical stimulation, the brain doesn’t have a chance to learn the pattern.
“We want to program [the scheme] in a variational way that won’t allow the central nervous system and its disorders to habituate to the therapeutic effect of the stimulation,” Uthman says.
Uthman and Panos Pardalos, PhD, are working on how to deliver combinations of different stimulation parameters at various frequencies. Pardalos is a professor of industrial and systems engineering at the university.
The technology also uses data mining and analysis to find certain patterns that could help identify disorders in the brain.
Panos Pardalos, PhD, works with Uthman to define the stimulation parameters and develop combinations at various frequencies.
Uthman hopes that in addition to regulating seizure activities, the technology can be used to treat disorders such as Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s diseases. It is currently designed for integration into existing stimulation devices, and it can be used in both the central and peripheral nervous systems.
Uthman is open to working with people who want to apply the technology to different conditions. At UF, the researchers are using the technology to address movement disorders.
“A lot [of disorders] have to do with rhythmic episode phenomenon,” says Uthman. “Maybe with time, this technology may work with deep brain stimulation and not just with vagus nerve stimulation.” It might have use in spinal chord stimulation to treat pain disorders as well.
Uthman says that the technology’s program is complex. Manufacturers may need to revise a neurostimulation device so that it has the capacity to run the program. However, he emphasizes that the technology is in its early developmental stages, and the team needs to prove the concept.
The UF researchers plan to introduce the program to rats that have stopped responding to traditional stimulation. If the researchers receive approval to conduct human studies, they hope to find out if the technique works better than current methods of neurostimulation.
“Although vagus nerve stimulation has been used for a long time, nobody knows why it works the way it works. Only lately have we tried to see what we changed in the brain.”
UF’s Office of Technology Licensing is currently looking for companies interested in the patent-pending technology.
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| Ravindra K. Ahuja, Krishna C. Jha, Arvind Kumar, and James B. Orlin received Koopman Prize at the 2008 INFORMS National Meeting for their paper,"Exact and Heuristics Algorithms for the Weapon-Target Assignment Problem." Koopman Prize is given to the outstanding contribution of the year in the field of Military Operations Research. This paper is published in Operations Research, volume 55, year 2007, pages 1136 - 1146. |
| Ravindra K. Ahuja became an INFORMS Fellow at the 2008 INFORMS National Meeting. Each year, 1 out of 1,000 INFORMS become INFORMS Fellow. He was bestowed the Fellowship for his outstanding contributions "For algorithmic research in network optimization, for the development of innovative methods in transportation scheduling, and for his contributions to practice in the railroad industry." |
| Ravindra K. Ahuja has been named Associate Editor for Operations Research in the Transportation area. | Ravindra K. Ahuja co-edited a Focused Issue of the journal "Transportation Science" on Railroad Application. This issue appeared in November 2008. |
| US News and World Report rankings for 2008 have placed the ISE graduate program 9th among departments at public universities and 13th overall. | Panos Pardalos received a 2006-07 Doctoral Dissertation Advisor/Mentoring Award from the Graduate School at the University of Florida. Dr. Pardalos is one of five such awardess university-wide. |
| Edwin Romeijn and PhD student Dionne Aleman receive IERC 2006 best paper award in the area of Service Systems. The paper´s title is "A Response Surface-Based Approach to Beam Orientation Optimization in IMRT Treatment Planning." | Joseph Geunes was awarded a 2005 Manufacturing & Service Operations Management Meritorious Service Award for doing "an exceptional job by providing timely, unbiased, and thoughtful reviews." |
| Diane Schaub was recently elected as the Institute of Industrial Engineers (IIE) Regional Vice President, and will be inducted at the IIE Annual Conference in Orlando in May 2006. Florida is in region 3, which includes the southeastern US and Puerto Rico. |
| Wagner Prize awarded to Ravi Ahuja and colleagues: Ravi Ahuja and two of his former Ph.D. students (Krishna Jha and Jian Liu) were awarded the INFORMS Daniel H. Wagner Prize for Excellence in Operations Research Practice at the 2006 INFORMS Annual Conference. |
| Mathematical and Computational Models for Congestion Charging (S. Lawphongpanich, D.W. Hearn, and M.J. Smith, eds.) was recently published by Springer (2006)
| Panos Pardalos was elected a fellow of the Institute For Operations Research and Management Sciences (INFORMS) in 2006. Professor Pardalos was recognized at a special ceremony at the INFORMS 2006 Annual Conference. |
| Panos Pardalos was elected an Honorary member of The Mongolian Academy of Sciences. | Diane Schaub was selected as the Institute of Industrial Engineers (IIE) Region 3 Outstanding Faculty Advisor Award winner and recognized at the IIE annual meeting in Atlanta in May, 2005. |
| UF ISE faculty and student co-author featured article in OR: Professors Edwin Romeijn and Ravi Ahuja, along with recent ISE PhD grad Arvind Kumar, are co-authors with James Dempsey from UF´s Radiation Oncology Department on the featured article in Operations Research in Issue 54 No. 2. The article is titled "A New Linear Programming Approach to Radiation Therapy Treatment Planning Problems." |
| Farid AitSahlia’s book, Elementary Probability Theory (with K. L. Chung), has recently been selected for translation into Russian by BKL Publishers. | Richard L. Francis, Professor Emeritus, gave a special address on “Aggregation Error for Location Models” at a June, 2005 meeting of location theory researchers in Seville, Spain. |
| Stan Uryasev has been named an Associate Editor for The Journal of Risk | J. Cole Smith has been named Associate Editor for Networks, The Journal of
Global Optimization, the Journal of Problem Solving, and Optimization Letters. |
| Joseph Geunes and Panos Pardalos, are authors of the annotated bibliography, “Network Optimization in Supply Chain Management and Financial Engineering” which was recently recognized by the editorial board of the journal Networks as the second most downloaded paper from the journal´s web site during 2004 |
| Undergraduates Mike Duncan and Arianne Orillac took first and second place, respectively, in the 2005 IIE Region 3 Technical Paper Competition. | The UF student chapter of the Institute of Industrial Engineers (IIE) received a Gold Award from IIE for chapter excellence for the fourth consecutive year. |
| H. Edwin Romeijn, and recent ISE PhD graduate Kevin Taaffe received the best paper award in the Logistics and Inventory track at the IIE Annual Conference in May, 2005, for their paper entitled, “Selected Newsvendor Problems with All-or-Nothing Order Requests.” |
| ISE researchers received the INFORMS William Pierskalla best paper award for research excellence in health care management science in both 2003 and 2004. The 2003 award went to H.E.Romeijn, R.K. Ahuja, J.F. Dempsey, and Arvind Kumar for their paper “A Column Generation Approach to Radiation Therapy Treatment Planning using Aperture Modulation” and the 2004 award was for the paper, “Seizure warning algorithm based on optimization and nonlinear dynamics,” published in by Panos Pardalos, W. Chaovalitwongse, L. D. Iasemidis, J. C. Sackellares, D-S. Shiau, P. R. Carney, O. A. Prokopyev and V. A. Yatsenko. |
| Panos Pardalos has been elected as a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), and he also received the degree of Honorary Doctor from the Nizhni Novgorod State University in Russia. | Don Hearn was elected as a Fellow of the Institute for Operations Research and Management Science (INFORMS), receiving the award at the 2004 annual meeting in Denver. |
