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• May

  22

  IEMS Seminar: Urbanisation and Innovation: Looking Under the Hood With Big Data

  Department of Industrial Engineering and Management Sciences

  11:00 AM M228, Technological Institute

  EVENT DETAILS

  Hyejin Youn, Ph.D.
  Kellogg School of Management

  Abstract: In this talk, I will talk about two most defining characteristics in our society: urbanisation and innovation. On one hand, ever-expanding urban built environments are centre of population growth, economic engine, and energy consumption. On the other hand, our technology advances increasingly rapidly, transforming both physical and social infrastructures into better or worse contingency. Therefore, understanding fundamental dynamics at the both ends, and bridging them can provide valuable insight into the nature of challenges of sustainability. But, how we can do this? With an increasing volume of data and computational power, these dynamics are now directly quantified, measured, and analysed. Furthermore, the accessibility of detailed data opens up the possibility to recontextualise mathematical and computational tools hitherto implemented only in natural science into complex social and economic systems, whereby their microscopic dynamics can be expressed in a systematic and comprehensive way. The talk will give a few empirical analyses that show how this new approach has uncovered interesting nature of the dynamics. Take urban studies for example. We now have access to each city’s economic fabric such as where people live and work, and how and when they commute between them; their average wages and income levels; their associated occupations and workplaces, and sets of skills that are required to accomplish a task; and what kind of topics that are communicated. Analysing these datasets reveals that cities, operating intricate interactions, nonetheless exhibit self-similar patterns, and thus their quantities are expressed by a set of simple scaling laws.
  Take another example of innovation, commonly recognised as an important source of wealth creation, economic growth, and societal change, and perhaps, one of the main reasons for city’s existence. There are growing empirical data to identify the dynamics of innovation, such as, to name a few, scientific publication, patent data, and Google n-gram. Piecing these datasets together amounts to a good representation of technological change as combinations of existing ideas. It has been observed that the combinatorial landscape is modulated, and the structural change demarcates technological eras. Under this framework, coupled with human society data, we can look at the interplay between human society and technological change at all levels. One example, which will be shown in this talk, is how to predict technological unemployment in urban areas. The task requires us to collect and maintain large, complex datasets, and to bring together and coordinate experts of different fields – computation, mathematics, economics and sociology.

  Biography: Hyejin Youn is an Assistant Professor of Management & Organization Department at the Kellogg School of Management, and a core faculty at NICO, the Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems. She is also Royal Society of Arts fellow, and an external fellow at London Mathematical Laboratory, London, UK. Prior to joining Kellogg, she worked at University of Oxford, Harvard University, and MIT Media Lab, and Santa Fe Institute, as a research fellow. Hyejin received her PhD in Physics in 2011 from Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST). She was a Principal Investigator of the project a National Science Foundation grant (USA) to study Technological Change from the Map of Capabilities.

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  TIME Tuesday, May 22, 2018 at 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM

  LOCATION M228, Technological Institute    map it

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  CONTACT Agnes Kaminski    a-kaminski@northwestern.edu EMAIL

  CALENDAR Department of Industrial Engineering and Management Sciences

• Apr

  23

  Massive Speedups for Policy Simulation in Inventory Management Applications

  Department of Industrial Engineering and Management Sciences (IEMS)

  11:00 AM ITW 1.350, Ford Motor Company Engineering Design Center

  EVENT DETAILS

  Abstract: Policy simulation — i.e. producing a single state trajectory of a dynamical system controlled by some state dependent policy — is often the core computational bottleneck in modern Reinforcement Learning algorithms. The multiple, inherently serial, policy evaluations that must be performed in one such simulation constitute the bulk of this bottleneck. As a concrete example, simulating a fulfillment optimization policy on a month's worth of demand at a moderately large retailer is a task that can take several hours.

  We present a class of iterative algorithms we dub Picard Iteration. Our scheme carefully allocates policy evaluation tasks across independent (GPU) threads. Within each iteration a single thread only evaluates the policy on its assigned tasks while assuming a certain ‘cached’ evaluation for other tasks. This cache is updated at the end of the iteration. A single iteration is ideally suited for the type of parallelism offered by a GPU (essentially the batched application of a neural network) yielding 1000x+ speedups. Unfortunately, for general problems the number of iterations required for convergence will scale with the horizon of the simulation.

  We prove and demonstrate empirically, that the structure afforded by inventory management problems allows Picard iteration to converge in a small number of iterations independent of the horizon. As one practical consequence, we demonstrate a 500x speedup in policy simulation for large-scale fulfillment optimization problems. Our scheme offers a blueprint for similar speedups in related policy simulation and sequential inference tasks.

  Joint work with Joren Gijsbrechts, Aryan Khojandi, Tianyi Peng and Andy Zheng.

  Bio: Vivek is interested in the development of new methodologies and applications for large scale dynamic optimization. He received his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University in 2007 and is the Patrick J. McGovern (1959) Professor at MIT. Vivek is a recipient of an INFORMS MSOM Student Paper Prize (2006), an INFORMS JFIG paper prize (2009, 2011), the NSF CAREER award (2011), MIT Sloan’s Outstanding Teacher award (2013), the INFORMS Simulation Society Best Publication Award (2014), the INFORMS Pricing and Revenue Management Best Publication Award (2015), the INFORMS MSOM Best Publication award in Management Science (2016), the MSOM Young Scholar Prize and the MIT-wide Jamieson Prize for Excellence in Teaching (2020). His practice based work has won the Wagner prize (2022) and has been judged a finalist for the Pierskalla Award (2011), the Gary L. Lilien ISMS-MSI Marketing Practice Prize (2016) and the Wagner Prize (2018). Vivek’s doctoral advisees have on various occasions won the Nicholson, MSOM, APS and RMP student paper prizes. Outside of academia, Vivek was co-founder/CTO at Celect (2014-19; acquired by Nike) and was a corresponding author of the Nature Communications paper underlying the technology at Seer (IPO in 2020). He serves on several technology startup advisory boards and has worked in various capacities in quantitive finance and private equity.

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  TIME Tuesday, April 23, 2024 at 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM

  LOCATION ITW 1.350, Ford Motor Company Engineering Design Center    map it

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  CONTACT Kendall Minta    kendall.minta@gmail.com EMAIL

  CALENDAR Department of Industrial Engineering and Management Sciences (IEMS)

• May

  8

  Extending Care: A Conversation about Conservation and Futurity

  Block Museum of Art

  6:00 PM Block Museum of Art, Mary and Leigh

  EVENT DETAILSmore info

  The Center for Scientific Studies in the Arts is a collaboration between the Art Institute of Chicago and materials science-related departments at Northwestern University to pursue objects-based and objects-inspired scientific research. Materials research benefits ongoing work in conservation, archaeology, art history, and curatorial scholarship.

  Learn how the Center uses materials research to care for art objects in sustainable, innovative ways with Maria Kokkori, Senior Scientist in the Center for Scientific Studies in the Arts. She will be in conversation with Corey Byrnes, Northwestern Associate Professor of Chinese Culture and co-founder/co-director of the Environmental Humanities Workshop in Kaplan Humanities Center.

  This event is presented by the McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science in conjunction with exhibition Actions for the Earth: Art, Care & Ecology.

  Register Now

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  TIME Wednesday, May 8, 2024 at 6:00 PM - 7:30 PM

  LOCATION Block Museum of Art, Mary and Leigh    map it

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  CONTACT Block Museum of Art    block-museum@northwestern.edu EMAIL

  CALENDAR Block Museum of Art

• Jun

  10

  Northwestern Engineering PhD Hooding and Master's Degree Recognition Ceremony

  McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science

  9:00 AM Welsh-Ryan Arena

  EVENT DETAILSmore info

  McCormick School of Engineering PhD Hooding and Master’s Degree Recognition Ceremony

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  TIME Monday, June 10, 2024 at 9:00 AM - 11:00 AM

  LOCATION Welsh-Ryan Arena   

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  CONTACT Amy Pokrass    amy.pokrass@northwestern.edu EMAIL

  CALENDAR McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science

• Jun

  10

  Northwestern Engineering Undergraduate Convocation

  McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science

  2:00 PM Welsh-Ryan Arena

  EVENT DETAILSmore info

  McCormick School of Engineering Undergraduate Convocation

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  TIME Monday, June 10, 2024 at 2:00 PM - 4:00 PM

  LOCATION Welsh-Ryan Arena   

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  CONTACT Amy Pokrass    amy.pokrass@northwestern.edu EMAIL

  CALENDAR McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science