Guest Speaker: Theodore T. Allen

Associate Professor in the Integrated Systems Engineering department at The Ohio State University

Theodore T. Allen
Dreese Labs 480
2015 Neil Ave, Columbus, Ohio 43210

Decision Problems and Methods in Analytics: Voters Waiting, Multi-Fidelity Process Tuning, And/Or Directed Military Text Modeling

This presentation briefly reviews three real world application problems in which innovative methods were developed to help address needs. First, real world engagements in multiple states of simulation optimization to reduce voting waiting times are described with some of our own rigorous selection and ranking methods. Second, methods for optimizing manufacturing process parameters using our own multi-fidelity Kriging optimization methods are described. Related welding process uses are mentioned. Finally, our proposed Subject Matter Expert Refined Topic model methods are described together with applications in military text and medical alarm-related corpora. The methods use "high-level" data from expert opinions to tune the cluster definitions to align with needs and established taxonomies. 

Bio: Theodore T. Allen is an Associate Professor in the Integrated Systems Engineering department at the Ohio State University. He received his B.A. from Princeton, his M.S. from UCLA, and his Ph.D. from the University of Michigan (1997). He is currently the president of the Social Media Analytics section of INFORMS and the simulation area editor of Computers & Industrial Engineering (IF: 3.2). He has published over 60 refereed publications and received over 25 grants as PI including from NSF, ARCYBER, and GE Appliances. His research on simulation optimization for voting machine allocation has received national attention and he has contributed to millions of voters avoiding hours of waiting and effective or actual law changes in North Carolina, Ohio, and Michigan. He has also served as associate editor for the Journal of Manufacturing Systems and Quality Approaches in Education and as a reviewer for Operations Research, Technometrics, and many other journals.

Host: Rajiv Ramnath