2016 INFORMS Annual Meeting Program

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INFORMS Nashville – 2016
412
WB49
211-MCC
Panel: Publishing in INFORMS Transactions
on Education
Sponsored: Education (INFORMED)
Sponsored Session
Moderator: Jeroen Belien, KU Leuven, Brussel, Belgium,
1 - Informs Transactions On Education (ITE): A General Overview
Jeroen Belien, KU Leuven,
The panelists include ITE editors and authors who have published recently in ITE.
The authors will discuss their experiences with submitting articles to ITE. The
editors will provide suggestions to authors who wish to submit their work to
ITE—in particular, articles about case studies and about educational games.
2 - Publishing Classroom Games In Ite
Stefan Creemers, IESEG School of Management Lille,
3 - Ite Author Experiences
Vera Tilson, University of Rochester,
4 - Informs Transactions On Education Author Experiences
Maureen Lojo, California State University,
WB50
212-MCC
SpORts: Sports Analytics IV
Sponsored: SpORts
Sponsored Session
Chair: Sean Barnes, Univ of Maryland-College Park, Robert H. Smith
School of Business, College Park, MD, 20742, United States,
Co-Chair: Margret Bjarnadottir, University of Maryland, College Park,
College Park, MD, 2, United States,
1 - A Predictive Modeling And Robust Optimization Framework For
Prioritizing Major League Baseball Free Agent Acquisitions
Margrét Bjarnadóttir, Univ of Maryland-College Park, College
Park, MD, United States, , Sean Barnes,
Aurelie Thiele
Major League Baseball teams are tasked with constructing rosters of players that
can compete successfully against other teams. This process involves making
decisions about which players to acquire via free agency. We propose a predictive
modeling and robust optimization framework for supporting these free agent
acquisition decisions. Specifically, we develop predictive models for expected
player performance, and optimize free agent acquisitions (robustly) for a given
budget. We demonstrate the effectiveness of this approach across several scenarios
of budget levels and free agent markets.
2 - An Optimization-based Approach For The National Football
League Tiebreaking Procedure
Matias Siebert, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA,
United States, , George L Nemhauser,
Joel Sokol
When the NFL regular season is in its final weeks, teams, fans and media want to
know which teams have clinched a place in the playoffs, which one are
eliminated and which teams still have the chance to make the playoffs. Given the
number of possible scenarios and the intricacies of the tiebreaking procedures,
simple enumeration approaches to solve this problem become highly inefficient in
practice. We propose an optimization-based approach to determine the current
situation and the possibilities for each team to make the playoffs.
3 - Sporting: A Large Applied Research Project In Sport Scheduling
Tomas Nordlander, SINTEF ICT, Trondheim, Norway,
Sports leagues and tournaments are scheduled daily around the world. Although
the underlying problem is a hard mathematical problem, most end-users resort to
manual scheduling. In 2005, SINTEF’s optimisation developed CupCom for
Profixio AS. This is an optimisation engine for tournament scheduling, which last
year scheduled around 150,000 matches of handball, football and volleyball in
Norway and Sweden. We have also been helping the Norwegian Football
Federation with scheduling their top professional leagues for several years. I will
talk about this and our new large research-based innovation project together with
PROFIXIO AS.
4 - Automating The Scheduling Of A Softball League
Kent J Kostuk, Federated Co-Operatives Limited,
Keith Willoughby
A local minor softball league was finding it difficult to manually develop and
publish league schedules in the short time window available between when teams
were formed and when a published schedule was required. Early prototypes were
developed to demonstrate proof of concept as prior attempts to automate had not
been successful. A complete solution was developed allowing the league to
produce and publish league schedules with significantly less work and eliminating
the need to transcribe manually generated schedules into electronic documents.
WB51
213-MCC
Education I
Contributed Session
Chair: Jay Parsons, Associate Professor, University of Nebraska -
Lincoln, 103B Filley Hall, P.O. Box 830922, Lincoln, NE, 68583-0922,
United States,
1 - A Holistic Conceptual Framework For Assessing The
Effectiveness And Viability Of an Academic Program
munir majdalawieh, Associate Professor, zayed university, Mirdif,
Dubai, 19282, United Arab Emirates,
Many aspects of the accreditation process focus on the past and the present
(prove), the “program review” assessment is “forward-looking assessment”
(improve) and thus transforms the process into a continuing assessment activity
rather than a periodic event. The aim of this paper is to propose a conceptual
framework for “program review” to assess the effectiveness and viability of an
academic program and to improve the academic program and the education of
the students. The proposed framework and the program review measurement
matrix will provide an opportunity to colleges and universities to undertake a
robust and targeted approach to proactively and continuously review their
academic programs.
2 - Experience With A New Online Game To Teach Sourcing In A
Supply Chain Management Course
Samuel C Wood, President, Responsive Learning Techologies,
4546 El Camino Real, #243, Los Altos, CA, 94022, United States,
, Mozart Batista de Castro Menezes
The Gleacher Sourcing game is a new online competitive simulation from the
developers of Littlefield Technologies and the Supply Chain Game. In the game,
students compete and collaborate in ad hoc supply chains to maximize cash
position or earnings. After an overview of the game this paper will discuss the use
of the game in a Masters level Supply Chain Management course. In a 2-hour
game, students managed the interplay between double marginalization, sourcing
agreements, pricing, and working capital management.
3 - A Closer Look At Underrepresented Women In Engineering:
A Classroom Study Exploring The Effects Of Anonymity On
Student Peer Reviewers
Jacqueline Ng, PhD Candidate, Northwestern University, 2145
Sheridan Road, C-230, Evanston, IL, 60208, United States,
Bruce Ankenman, Seyed Iravani
The underrepresentation of women in STEM is a complex problem with few
answers. We conduct a classroom study investigating the effects of anonymity on
the critical nature of peer feedback. Using NLP and machine learning, we find that
women are more sensitive than men to anonymity. Specifically, anonymous
women provide more negative feedback than non-anonymous women, but less
constructive feedback. Moreover, the negative sentiment is directed mainly at
their male peers. In contrast, we do not find such dissimilarities between
anonymous and non-anonymous men. This study suggests that STEM women
may benefit from greater opportunities to support and mentor each other, outside
of the classroom.
4 - Simple Tools To Help Agricultural Decision Makers Think
About Risk
Jay Parsons, Associate Professor, University of Nebraska - Lincoln,
103B Filley Hall, P.O. Box 830922, Lincoln, NE, 68583-0922,
United States, Jim Jansen
The focus of this talk will be on experiences in developing and using simple tools
to help agricultural producers think about and manage risk. Using a simulation
scenario and a Risk Scenario Planning tool, we focused on helping producers to
think about managing market risk from the standpoint of controlling the
distribution of possible outcomes. Marketing alternatives and risk have been
difficult topics to education common producers about in the past and continue to
be so. However, our approach has shown significant growth in audience
commitment to action in managing market risk better in the future.
WB49