Keynote Speakers

Professor Georgia Perakis
Editor-in-Chief, Manufacturing & Service Operations Management
 
In this talk I will discuss how Analytics have helped for tackling the COVID-19 pandemic. I will present work from various groups but will mostly focus on the work of my team related to COVID-19 this past year. I will discuss the MIT-Cassandra model that is a suite of models that are part of an ensemble method for COVID-19 case and death prediction. I will discuss the individual methods and what motivated them and then the ensemble method and show how they perform with data in the US. I will discuss how these models are comparing relative to other models also used by the CDC. I will further connect these predictions with detecting true infection (also referred to as prevalence). Finally, I will discuss how these methods and results can be used to distribute vaccines in different counties (or areas) within a state (or country) to a heterogeneous population, through optimization, ensuring fair distribution among the different counties. We will show how the proposed optimization model performs in the different counties in the state of Massachusetts.

(The MIT-Cassandra team includes in addition to myself my students (current and former): Amine Bennouna, David Nze-Ndong, Boyan Peshlov, Divya Singhvi, Omar Skali-Lami, Yiannis Spantidakis, Leann Thayaparan, Asterios Tsiourvas, Shane Weisberg)

Professor John Birge
Editor-in-Chief, Operations Research

The COVID-19 pandemic has affected human activity over the past two years in many ways. Changes have been particularly strong for mobility, communication, logistics, and the application of rational decision making, which form the core of production and operations management (POM). This talk will review some of these changes and the lessons they provide for the future development of POM.