September 26
@
12:00 PM
–
1:00 PM
UW-ISyE looks forward to welcoming Dr. Georgia Perakis, Professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management.
Data-driven decision-making has garnered a growing interest due to the increase in data availability in recent years. With that growth many opportunities as well as challenges arise. Optimization, Machine Learning (ML) and more generally, AI play and can play even more an important role to address important challenges in a variety of Operations Management applications. In this talk, we will discuss some of these applications and will highlight the importance and challenges of integrating optimization with ML in data-driven decision-making. We will also discuss some concrete examples of these synergies in pricing and healthcare. As a result, we will also discuss how we can optimize over already trained objective functions that arise from neural network models in order to recommend better decisions.
Bio: Georgia Perakis is the William F. Pounds Professor and a Professor of Operations Management, Operations Research & Statistics at the MIT Sloan School of Management. She is also serving as co-director of the Operations Research Center. On July 1 she started her sabbatical at Harvard Business School where she is spending the year as a Visiting Scholar. For the past year and a half, she served as the John C Head III Dean (Interim) at MIT Sloan and before that, she served as an Associate Dean for Social and Ethical Responsibility in Computing (SERC) in the Schwarzman College of Computing and MIT Sloan. Her research has received many awards and focuses on analytics/AI, in particular, in the intersection of optimization and machine learning with applications in pricing, revenue management, supply chain, sustainability and healthcare among others. She received the PECASE Award from the Office of the President on Science and Technology. In 2016, she was elected as an INFORMS Fellow, and in 2021 as Distinguished MSOM Fellow.
Perakis has passion for supervising PhD, masters, and undergraduate students, having graduated 34 PhD and 63 master’s students. She has received numerous awards for teaching including the Graduate Student Council Teaching Award (2002), the Samuel M. Seegal Award (2012), the Jamieson Prize for excellence in Teaching (2014), the Teacher of the Year Award (2017) and the Outstanding Teaching Award (2024) at MIT Sloan. Perakis is currently the Editor in Chief of the M&SOM journal and has served on the editorial board at a number of other journals. She holds a BS in mathematics from the University of Athens as well as an MS in applied mathematics and a PhD in applied mathematics from Brown University.