Inside Our Program

Program Events

Events

• Feb

  17

  IEMS Nemhauser and Nelson Best Student Paper Seminar

  Department of Industrial Engineering and Management Sciences (IEMS)

  11:00 AM A230, Technological Institute

  EVENT DETAILS

  Nemhauser Best Paper Award: Chutong Gao, Redundancy or Flexibility? Interplay between their Values in Designing Fork-Join Systems

  Coauthors: Seyed Iravani, Ohad Perry

  Citation: We consider fork-join systems with redundancy and flexibility. Fork-join systems empower numerous modern online service platforms, such as AI agent workflows, among other real-world applications. In a 𝑘-requirement fork-join (FJ𝑘, 𝑘 ≥ 2) system, each job “forks” into multiple tasks processed in parallel, among which 𝑘 tasks are required to “join” for the completion of the job. To minimize the mean job sojourn times in FJ𝑘 systems, two strategies—redundancy and flexibility—are often employed. Redundancy deploys 𝑛 (> 𝑘) stations and sends one task from a job to each, but only 𝑘 out of 𝑛 tasks are needed to complete the job (rendering the remaining 𝑛 − 𝑘 tasks redundant). Flexibility, on the other hand, enables dynamic service capacity allocation. To understand the impact on the mean sojourn time of each strategy and their interplay, we propose a unified modeling framework that simultaneously considers: (i) how many redundant stations should be deployed, and (ii) how the service capacities should be allocated among all stations. We primarily focus on exponentially distributed task sizes. When flexibility is allowed, we prove a class of longest-queue policies are global-optimal, regardless of having redundancy or lack thereof—so redundancy has no marginal value in the existence of flexibility. In the absence of flexibility, we prove in FJ2 systems that “a little redundancy goes a long way”, in a twofold sense: To achieve heavy traffic optimality relative to the global-optimal system, it suffices to (i) employ only one extra station, and (ii) allocate an arbitrarily small capacity 𝜖 > 0 to that extra station. This suggests that (even a little) redundancy is as attractive as (full) flexibility in reducing sojourn times. Numerical studies further support the above insights in FJ𝑘 systems with 𝑘 > 2. We further consider a family of Weibull task-size distributions, where exponential becomes a special case. We show that when the variability of task sizes is low, redundancy can reduce the stability region (and thus harm both throughput and the sojourn time), so it should not be implemented. For highly variable task sizes, redundancy alone can expand the stability region, and flexibility on top of that further expands the stability region. But the flexible control policies need to be selected with extra caution—otherwise, implementing flexibility can harm the system’s stability.

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  Nelson Best Paper Award: Tong Xu, Integer programming for learning directed acyclic graphs from nonidentifiable Gaussian models

  Coauthors: Armeen Taeb, Simge Küçükyavuz, Ali Shojaie

  Citation: We study the problem of learning directed acyclic graphs from continuous observational data, generated according to a linear Gaussian structural equation model. State-of-the-art structure learning methods for this setting have at least one of the following shortcomings: (i) they cannot provide optimality guarantees and can suffer from learning suboptimal models; (ii) they rely on the stringent assumption that the noise is homoscedastic, and hence the underlying model is fully identifiable. We overcome these shortcomings and develop a computationally efficient mixed-integer programming framework for learning medium-sized problems that accounts for arbitrary heteroscedastic noise. We present an early stopping criterion under which we can terminate the branch-and-bound procedure to achieve an asymptotically optimal solution and establish the consistency of this approximate solution. In addition, we show via numerical experiments that our method outperforms state-of-the-art algorithms and is robust to noise heteroscedasticity, whereas the performance of some competing methods deteriorates under strong violations of the identifiability assumption. The software implementation of our method is available as the Python package micodag.

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  TIME Tuesday, February 17, 2026 at 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM

  LOCATION A230, Technological Institute    map it

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  CONTACT Kendall Minta    kendall.minta@gmail.com EMAIL

  CALENDAR Department of Industrial Engineering and Management Sciences (IEMS)

• Feb

  3

  IEMS Seminar 02/03 Kibaek Kim Winter 2026

  Department of Industrial Engineering and Management Sciences (IEMS)

  11:00 AM A230, Technological Institute

  EVENT DETAILSmore info

  IEMS Seminar 02.03 Kibaek Kim

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  TIME Tuesday, February 3, 2026 at 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM

  LOCATION A230, Technological Institute    map it

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  CONTACT Kendall Minta    kendall.minta@gmail.com EMAIL

  CALENDAR Department of Industrial Engineering and Management Sciences (IEMS)

• Feb

  5

  Beyond the Play Button: AI Transformation in Audio Streaming

  Master of Science in Machine Learning and Data Science (MLDS)

  2:30 PM Krebs Classroom, North Campus Parking Garage

  EVENT DETAILS

  Can AI understand your listening soul? We will explore how genAI capabilities translate into real-world, industry-scale use case from a major audio streaming platform. By introducing a novel semantic tokenization that encodes relationships between content and users, data scientists and AI practitioners can enable LLMs to reason directly over music catalogs, user intent, and personalization signals. This unlocks explainable recommendations, richer semantic search, and more adaptive discovery experiences, built at production scale.

  Learn how generative and agentic AI will power the next generation of interactive, personalized, and creative entertainment experiences.
  
  Speaker Biography:

  Kingsley Di is the Head of Applied AI/ML at SiriusXM & Pandora, and a veteran machine learning engineer. In his current role, he is leading SiriusXM’s end-to-end AI strategy and overseeing large-scale model development, product innovation and global enterprise deployment. Prior to joining SiriusXM, Kingsley led an NLP research team at S&P Global where he helped modernize the credit ratings value chain through intelligent automation. Earlier in his career, he joined American Express as a Senior Research Scientist after earning his Ph.D. from Northwestern University. His research was focused on distributed machine learning and deep learning with concentration in transportation and sports entertainment.

  Aside from AI and ML models, Kingsley is an active photographer and has a passion for documenting and reflecting AI’s evolving impact on civilization through his photos.

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  TIME Thursday, February 5, 2026 at 2:30 PM - 3:30 PM

  LOCATION Krebs Classroom, North Campus Parking Garage    map it

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  CONTACT Master of Science in Machine Learning and Data Science Program    mlds@northwestern.edu EMAIL

  CALENDAR Master of Science in Machine Learning and Data Science (MLDS)

• Feb

  10

  IEMS Seminar 2/10 Feng Ruan Winter 2026

  Department of Industrial Engineering and Management Sciences (IEMS)

  11:00 AM A230, Technological Institute

  EVENT DETAILSmore info

  IEMS Seminar 02/10 Feng Ruan

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  TIME Tuesday, February 10, 2026 at 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM

  LOCATION A230, Technological Institute    map it

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  CONTACT Kendall Minta    kendall.minta@gmail.com EMAIL

  CALENDAR Department of Industrial Engineering and Management Sciences (IEMS)

• Mar

  3

  IEMS Seminar 03/03 Shane Henderson Winter 2026

  Department of Industrial Engineering and Management Sciences (IEMS)

  11:00 AM A230, Technological Institute

  EVENT DETAILSmore info

  IEMS Seminar 03.03 Shane Henderson

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  TIME Tuesday, March 3, 2026 at 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM

  LOCATION A230, Technological Institute    map it

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  CONTACT Kendall Minta    kendall.minta@gmail.com EMAIL

  CALENDAR Department of Industrial Engineering and Management Sciences (IEMS)

• Mar

  10

  IEMS Seminar 3/10 Nabarun Deb Winter 2026

  Department of Industrial Engineering and Management Sciences (IEMS)

  11:00 AM A230, Technological Institute

  EVENT DETAILSmore info

  IEMS Seminar 03/10 Nabarun Deb

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  TIME Tuesday, March 10, 2026 at 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM

  LOCATION A230, Technological Institute    map it

  ADD TO CALENDAR

  CONTACT Kendall Minta    kendall.minta@gmail.com EMAIL

  CALENDAR Department of Industrial Engineering and Management Sciences (IEMS)