Research Overview
My research involves utilizing mathematical and computational techniques from operations research, artificial intelligence, and statistics to solve problems in diverse areas including humanitarian logistics, military operations, service delivery, and economics.
Combinatorial Optimization
Challenging planning and scheduling tasks occur in every business domain. Examples include scheduling and routing of on-demand services (such as Uber, Lyft, Instacart, Doordash, Grubhub, and others), airline scheduling and routing, sports scheduling, physician and nurse scheduling, delivery routing, technician scheduling, cellular tower location, supply chain network design, and many others. These problems are difficult to solve and often have a big impact on a firm’s bottom line. Much of my work focuses in the area of combinatorial optimization, the mathematical and computational approaches used to solve and optimize these kinds of planning and scheduling problems.
Text Analytics, Natural Language Processing, and Information Fusion
Text analytics and natural language processing are computational methods for extracting information from raw text, understanding the information, and making intelligent inferences based upon this information. Information fusion entails combining information from multiple sources into a coherent picture. In my current work I am applying these techniques to social media to extract information and build a real-time situational awareness in humanitarian crisis situations.
Reinforcement Learning and Intelligent Control
Reinforcement learning (RL) is a machine learning technique that works by experimenting and learning from mistakes. In contrast to the more common machine learning tasks of predicting and classifying, RL is used for planning and control tasks such as defeating the world’s top player at the game of Go or trading stocks. In my current work I am applying RL to optimize dynamic pricing and capacity allocation in real-time.
Logistics and Supply Chain Management
Supply chains and logistical services constitute some of the most essential pillars of our modern economy. Much of my work is focused on problems occurring in logistics and supply chain management.
