Dear friends and colleagues,

The year 2020 has brought us one challenge after the next. The IEMS family — students, postdocs, staff, faculty, and alumni — has embraced these as opportunities to better teach our courses, serve our students, grow the diversity and inclusiveness of our community, and advance our research.

As a result of COVID-19, a number of IEMS undergraduates lost key summer internships in industry. Rising to this challenge, generous gifts from IEMS Advisory Board members funded nine undergraduates to serve as Summer Fellows. These students helped department faculty prepare for remote teaching by producing videos, websites, case studies, software, and more, all to improve the student experience this year and beyond. Check out Professor Bill White’s reimagined Organizational Behavior course with immersive interactive stories. The Fellows further worked on research projects ranging from optimizing and visualizing public school bus routing to predicting professional work relationships using data from online communication platforms.  

IEMS is advancing the state of the art in our core research methods of statistics and statistical machine learning, stochastic models and simulation, and optimization, with an emphasis on data-driven, computational research. This newsletter has just a small sampling of IEMS research, which includes an exciting and growing array of applications in energy systems, healthcare, computational social science, operations and logistics, security, and finance.  

The year 2020 isn’t done. Neither are we. I look forward to connecting with many of you in this and the coming year. And I look forward to how the IEMS family will continually rise to today’s challenges and those of the future.

The Center for Deep Learning (CDL) was established in 2018 as a resource for companies seeking to build or improve access to artificial intelligence (AI) by providing technical capacity and expertise. The center’s two main initiatives are DELOS, a serving platform tailored for deep learning models, and REFIT, a machine learning platform designed for IoT ecosystems. CDL provides an open forum that brings together leading industry players, startups, and academia to address the challenges of AI. Students collaborate with and receive feedback from industry professionals, while companies gain access to unique technical solutions, recruiting opportunities, and education opportunities for their teams.  

CDL is led by Professors Diego Klabjan, Douglas Downey, and Mark Werwath and includes more than a dozen faculty and student researchers from industrial engineering, computer science, and electrical and computer engineering.

The inaugural OSL Distinguished Lecture was held last October. Leon Bottou, senior research scientist at Facebook AI Research, delivered the talk. As part of his presentation, he ran a code from the 1990s that implemented the first successful convolutional neural network designed for handwritten character recognition.

Postdoc Tom Fei, whose research areas are machine learning, high-dimensional and robust statistics, and optimization, joined OSL in June. He has already submitted two papers with Zhaoran Wang on topics related to reinforcement learning.

Jorge Nocedal is part of a MURI grant, announced in Septemer 2020, in collaboration with the University of Texas at Austin and the University of Wisconsin. The $1 million grant aims to advance modeling and simulation capabilities for physical systems using optimization and machine learning techniques.

Zhaoran Wang is a principal investigator of the new Institute for Data, Econometrics, Algorithms, and Learning (IDEAL). Funded by a TRIPODS grant from the National Science Foundation, the institute is devoted to studying foundational problems related to machine learning, data analysis, and optimization in strategic and non-strategic environments.

As part of McCormick’s new Office of Professional Education, there have been several changes to MEM staff. Mark Werwath will continue to serve as MEM director after assuming a new role as executive director of the Office of Professional Education, effective August 1. Lauren Jones was promoted to MEM program coordinator, while Sarah Mitchell is now associate director of MEM and Abi Shay is senior associate director of MEM.

MEM currently has 34 part-time students enrolled and 18 full-time students enrolled. Eighteen full-time students have deferred their enrollment until Fall 2021.

The program welcomes several new and returning faculty this year, including Vijay Viswanathan, associate dean and associate professor of integrated marketing communications at Northwestern; Robin Soffer, associate professor of instruction at Northwestern, who will teach accounting components for Engineering Management; and Roland Eisenhuth, assistant vice president and chief economist at American Casualty Insurance Association, who will teach Financial Issues for Engineers.

MEM has seen the departure of valued and long-term faculty, including Professor Mike Marasco, who taught in the program for more than a decade, and Professor Mohan Rao, who taught in MEM for more than five years. They will both be sorely missed.

Forty-eight MSiA students are on track to graduate in December 2020, while a new cohort of 42 students recently began the program in September.

In May, MSiA collaborated with sponsor company ABC Supply Co. on an all-virtual hackathon, which challenged students to uncover insights from large datasets.

The program hosted its spring seminar with Katie Malone, director of data science at Tempus Labs, who discussed how the data science community has impacted her career. The program will host Rossella Blatt, director of data science and analytics at Nordstrom, for its fall quarter seminar.

MSiA welcomed Jack Davis as its new systems administrator, who started over the summer.

Professor Simge Küçükyavuz began a two-year term as INFORMS Computing Society Chair.

Professor Diego Klabjan developed CAVIDOTS, a new AI tool that provides easy-to-skim summaries of academic papers and could be a timesaver for COVID-19 researchers.

Professor Sanjay Mehrotra’s new model to help states estimate ventilator needs could be used as a planning framework for state and federal agencies.

Ibraheem Alinur’s (’20) startup, City Health Tech, launched a device that guides users through proper handwashing steps and also collects data on their washing practices. The company was also named one of the top 25 US student startups by the Liftoff List.

PhD students Brennan Antone and Niloufar Izadinia were named winners of NASA’s Human Research Program Grant Augmentation Competition.

Dipayan Banerjee (’19), a PhD student at Georgia Tech, received an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship.

Saif Bhatti (’20) was named to Crain’s Chicago Business’s “20 in Their 20s” for his company Renoster, a security company providing bio-acoustic monitoring technology that could reduce wildlife poaching around the world. He was also profiled in Northwestern Magazine about his work on the technology.

PhD student Daniel Duque Villarreal was named a finalist in the 2020 INFORMS Doing Good with Good OR Student Paper Competition.

Antonette Narvasa (’20) received Northwestern’s Waw-jashk Award in recognition of her contributions to inclusion and community at the University.

Undergraduate Sreya Parakala was accepted into The Garage at Northwestern’s Propel Program to advance her startup Iris Education, a virtual platform that provides international students clear, concise, centralized access to college culture to assist in decision making.

Undergraduate Avantika Raikar was accepted into The Garage at Northwestern’s Propel Program to advance her startup Lura, a website that offers designers information about a fabric’s characteristics, environmental impact, and even the carbon footprint involved in making it.

Undergraduate Arshya Srinivas was accepted into The Garage at Northwestern’s Propel Program to advance her startup ScopeNU, a discount aggregation platform that connects savings to communities.

PhD student Eugene Wickett received the Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems fellowship.

FACTS & FIGURES