Atlanta, GA | Posted:
October 26, 2010
In
his strategic vision and plan for Georgia Tech, President G. P. “Bud” Peterson
said that as Georgia Tech defines the research university of the 21st
century, it will lead in influencing major technological, social, and policy
decisions that address critical global challenges. Recognizing that
technological change is fundamental to the advancement of the human condition,
Georgia Tech is committed to improving the human condition at home and around
the globe. To achieve this vision, five strategic goals were developed, one of
which is to expand Georgia Tech’s global footprint and influence to ensure that
we are graduating good global citizens.
For
more than twenty years, Georgia Tech has fostered international alliances to
enhance learning experiences, build research collaborations, and promote
economic development. In that same period, the H. Milton Stewart School of
Industrial and Systems Engineering (ISyE) has been ranked the number one
graduate school for industrial and manufacturing engineering by U.S. News and World Reports. Drawing top
students and faculty from around the world and fostering its own international
relationships through operations research to logistics and supply chain
innovation and strategy, ISyE has proven itself a true global academic unit.
To
illustrate this, ISyE tracked some faculty and student activity during a four-month
period, from May to August 2010, and found that they moved back and forth
between six of seven continents – Africa, Asia, Australia, Europe, North
America, and South America. In that time,
ISyE faculty and students conducted applied research projects around the world,
participated in a variety of educational opportunities, gave invited keynote presentations,
took part in conference leadership roles, and performed outreach that has a
positive international health and humanitarian impact.
ISyE
engaged in numerous ongoing international programs. The Executive Masters in
International Logistics & Supply Chain Strategy (EMIL-SCS) held its
European residence this summer, visiting the Netherlands, Poland, and
Germany. Professors were in Shanghai to
teach the Dual Masters with Shanghai Jiao Tong University.
Thirty-two undergraduate students participated in the Beijing/Singapore study
abroad program, along with fifteen students from the National University of
Singapore and twenty-four students in Tsinghua University.
Increasingly international
institutions are seeking ISyE faculty experts to assist them in developing
their programs. For instance, one faculty
member traveled to Israel to chair an international review team, commissioned
by the Israel Council of Higher Education, to evaluate each of the industrial
engineering and management programs at universities and colleges throughout
Israel. Another was selected to spend a year as the founding department chair
for the industrial engineering department at the University of Science, Technology
and Research in Abu Dhabi.
While
some of ISyE’s faculty and students were invited speakers and teachers, others
collaborated on a variety of research projects and collaborations from supply
chain optimization in Australia to a project in Abu Dhabi evaluating renewable
and distributed energy options for countries of the Gulf Cooperation Council.
ISyE,
through the Georgia Tech Supply Chain & Logistics Institute (SCL), added
Panama to the established networks of Logistics Innovation Centers in Latin
America. The new Georgia Tech Panama
Logistic Innovation & Research Center has three core thrusts -- applied
research, education, and competitiveness -- and three primary objectives -- to
improve the logistics performance in Panama, to establish Panama as the trade
hub of the Americas, and to increase human capital with regards to logistics
competency. The SCL team continued their
research as part of the Georgia Tech Trade, Innovation & Productivity
Center in Costa Rica and began work to add two more centers to the Latin
America network – one in Mexico, scheduled to open at the end of this year, and
one in Chile, scheduled to be launched in 2011.
Some
highlights on ISyE’s efforts in international health and humanitarian response
include teams working in Haiti on debris collection and management issues, in
Central Africa on efforts to distribute five million textbooks to schools
throughout the county, in Singapore on issues in hospitals, and in Italy
working with the World Food Programme.
As
they engage in these global activities, ISyE faculty gain a broader understanding
surrounding different world issues, which they can covey to their students who
are heading into the global economy. These
faculty not only teach their students what is in the text book, they also tell
them from personal experience how to apply the methodologies, frameworks, and
strategies they teach in the classroom. ISyE
faculty also bring back a world of personal networks that they share with their
students in both classroom lectures and through Skype. This sharing of
knowledge and experience helps students prepare to lead effectively in an
increasingly global marketplace. And
those students learning, working, or living in a foreign country gain a
distinct advantage, having many opportunities to conduct real-world global
research that better positions them to contribute early on to the international
companies that will employ them.
For
an ISyE global tour featuring activities from May through August 2010, read the
list below, which is divided into four sections (Global Logistics; Health &
Humanitarian Outreach; International Education and Outreach; and Scholarly
Work, Presentations and Collaboration):
Global Logistics
Continent of Africa
- John
Bartholdi,
Manhattan Associates Chair of Supply Chain Management and Research
Director, The Supply Chain & Logistics Institute, was in Zimbabwe in
June as part of a UNICEF effort to distribute five million textbooks to
schools throughout the country.
Continent of North America
- H.
Donald Ratliff, executive director of the Supply Chain
& Logistics Institute (SCL) and UPS and Regents' Professor, and Jaymie Forrest, SCL managing director,
traveled to Panama City, Panama, in preparation for the inauguration ceremonies
of the newly established Georgia
Tech-Panama Logistics Innovation & Research Center. They also began strategic meetings to
establish a third Logistics Innovation Center, this time in Mexico. This center
is scheduled to open at the end of this year.
- H.
Donald Ratliff and Jaymit Forrest began two research
projects as part of the Georgia Tech Trade, Innovation & Productivity
Center in Costa Rica – the Produce Traceability Initiative and the Global
Procurement Analysis Global Trade Initiative.
The Produce Traceability Initiative was designed to demonstrate the
significance of leveraging value chains to facilitate participation of small
and medium sized enterprises, the challenges they face in the food export
market, and the need for supporting infrastructure to standardize processes in
order to remain competitive in global markets.
The purpose of the Global Procurement Analysis research project was to
develop metrics for the Costa Rica Digital Government Technical Secretary for
assessing the implementation of a new system providing a mechanism to assess
the improvements expected as a result of system implementation. The research
focused on the definition and quantification of key performance indicators,
along with summary statistics on government spending. The study also focused on
the potential savings opportunities arising from more efficient procurement
processes, including price variability analysis.
Continent of South America
- H.
Donald Ratliff, executive director of the Supply Chain
& Logistics Institute (SCL) and UPS and Regents' Professor, and Jaymie Forrest, SCL managing director, began
work to establish a fourth Logistics Innovation Center in Chile. This center is scheduled to be launched in
2011.
Health & Humanitarian Outreach
Continent of Asia
- Jim
Dai,
Edenfield Professor, was in Singapore visiting NUS while working on a
hospital project.
Continent of Europe
- Mallory
Soldner,
a PhD student working with Ozlem
Ergun, associate professor and co-director of the Center for Health
and Humanitarian Logistics, worked as a consultant in Rome, Italy, at the
headquarters of the United Nations’ World Food Programme. Her work
was funded through a partnership with the UPS Foundation.
Continent of North America
- Ozlem
Ergun,
associate professor and co-director of the Center for Health and
Humanitarian Logistics, and Julie
Swann, associate professor and co-director of the Center for Health
and Humanitarian Logistics, traveled to Haiti in May to investigate debris
collection and removal issues that are blocking the road to recovery in
Haiti. Ergun and Swann were joined by ISyE graduate students Jessica Heier Stamm and Kael Stilp, as well as Professor Reginald DesRoches, School of
Civil & Environmental Engineering (CEE), and CEE graduate student Josh Gresha. The team is currently
putting together their findings and will actively begin the process of
lobbying for more strategic leadership in this area.
International Education and
Outreach
Continent of Asia
- Jane
C. Ammons,
professor and associate dean of engineering, spent two weeks in Israel in
May as chair of an international review team commissioned by the Israel
Council of Higher Education to evaluate each of the industrial engineering
and management programs at universities and colleges throughout
Israel.
- John
Bartholdi,
Manhattan Associates Chair of Supply Chain Management and Research
Director, The Supply Chain & Logistics Institute, was in residence at
the University of Stellenbosch (near Cape Town) in South Africa where he
holds an honorary appointment as “Extraordinary Professor of Operations
Research” in the Department of Logistics within the Faculty of Economics.
Bartholdi will hold the title for the next three years.
- Shijie
Deng,
associate professor, was in Shanghai teaching Financial Engineering at
Jiao Tong University as part of the GT-SJTU Dual Masters Program.
- Ellis
Johnson,
Coca Cola Chair and professor, is in Shanghai teaching at Shanghai Jiao
Tong University as part of the GT-SJTU Dual Masters Program. Johnson
teaches both Deterministic Optimization and Computational Methods.
- Chelsea
C. “Chip” White,
Schneider National Chair in Transportation and Logistics, is in Abu Dhabi
where he is spending the year as the founding department chair for an
industrial engineering department at the University of Science, Technology
and Research (KUSTAR). While there, White will also help develop a
logistics institute similar to ISyE’s Supply Chain & Logistics
Institute.
- Chen
Zhou,
associate chair for undergraduate studies and associate professor,
participated in the 9th Beijing / Singapore summer study abroad
program from May until August. Thirty-two ISyE juniors and seniors
participated in the program, along with fifteen students from National
University of Singapore and twenty-four students in Tsinghua University. Valarie DuRant-Modeste, ISyE
academic advisor, was also on-site for two weeks.
Continent of Europe
- The
Supply Chain & Logistics Institute team designed a
company-specific executive education program for Coca-Cola Spain that
responded to the unique needs of the company and provided them with
specific and in-depth knowledge of supply chain engineering and
management.
- Julie
Swann,
associate professor and co-director of the Center for Health and
Humanitarian Logistics, taught in a humanitarian master's program in
Lugano, Switzerland, in August.
- John
Vande Vate,
professor and executive director of EMIL-SCS, led the 2011 Executive
Master’s in International Logistics & Supply Chain Strategy class on
its European residence, visiting the Netherlands, Poland and Germany.
Continent of North America
- Alan
Erera,
associate professor, was invited to lecture on the topic of
"Stochastic and Robust Optimization in Logistics" at the Spring
School on Combinatorial Optimization in Logistics held at the University
of Montreal in May.
- The
Supply Chain & Logistic team launched a master’s program in
Panama where students will come to Georgia Tech. They also developed a professional education
Lean Supply Chain Professionals Program in Panama for executives.
- The
Supply Chain & Logistics team,
in collaboration with the College of Management, designed an on-line international
executive education curriculum to assist the Coca-Cola Company in developing
leaders in the fields of logistics, manufacturing, supply chain and demand
management across its base of experts and professionals in the bottling system.
Scholarly Work, Presentations and
Collaborations
Continent of Asia
- Jim
Dai,
Edenfield Professor, participated in two conferences, one in Beijing and
another in Tokyo.
- Xiaoming Huo, associate
professor, has been working with researchers at Shanghai Jiao Tong
University’s Institute of Image Communication and Information Processing.
He co-authored the conference paper, “Image denoising using local tangent
space alignment,” for the 2010 Visual Communications and Image Processing
in Huang Shan, An Hui, China.
- Alex
Shapiro,
professor, was an invited speaker at the prestigious Congress of Mathematicians
(ICM) held in Hyderabad, India, August 19-27, 2010. Convening once every
four years, the ICM is the largest meeting of mathematicians from around
the world.
- Sobeil
Shayegh,
a PhD student being supervised by Valerie
Thomas, Anderson
Interface Associate Professor of Natural Systems, was in Abu Dhabi for the
summer for a project evaluating renewable and distributed energy options
for countries of the Gulf Cooperation Council. This project is in
collaboration with INSEAD, the French business university, and is based at
INSEAD’s Abu Dhabi campus.
Continent of Australia
- Martin
Savelsbergh,
Schneider Professor, worked in Australia this summer on a project related
to optimizing the export coal supply chain.
Continent of Europe
- Ton
Dieker,
assistant professor, spent the month of May at the University of Cambridge
where he was a visiting fellow of the Isaac Newton Institute for
Mathematical Sciences, a national and international visitor research
institute. While in the UK, Dieker also delivered talks at the University
of Warwick and in Edinburgh. Dieker and his student, Xuefeng Gao, who traveled with him, are working on service
allocation rules in networks of queues.
- Ozlem
Ergun,
associate professor and co-director of the Center for Health and Humanitarian
Logistics, was in Tromsø, Norway, in June for the Seventh Triennial
Symposium on Transportation Analysis (TRISTAN), an international
scientific conference that provides a high-quality forum for the
presentation of mathematical models, methodologies, and computational
results, and for the exchange of ideas and scientific discussions on
advanced applications and technologies in transportation. Ergun gave a
talk titled, “Managing Debris Collection and Disposal Operations,” which
she co-authored with Jose Antonio
Carbajal; Pinar Keskinocak, professor, co-director of the Center for
Health and Humanitarian Logistics, and associate director of Research for
the Health Systems Institute; Kael
Stilp; and Monica Villarreal.
- Pinar
Keskinocak
presented the “Catchup Scheduling for Childhood Vaccinations” paper at the
EURO INFORMS conference in Lisbon, Portugal, in July. The paper won the
EURO Excellence in Practice Award 2010.
- Eva
Lee,
professor and director of the Center for Operations Research in Medicine and
Healthcare, was in France and Sicily in June and July presenting talks at
two conferences. In June she spoke at the International Workshop on the
Role and Impact of Mathematics in Medicine, which was held in Paris. Lee’s
talk was titled, "Operations Research in Medicine and
HealthCare." In July, Lee gave the keynote talk, titled "Machine
Learning Framework for Classification in Medicine and Biology," at
the International School of Mathematics’ 52nd Workshop: Nonlinear
Optimization, Variational Inequalities and Equilibrium Problems in Erice,
Sicily.
- Julie
Swann,
associate professor and co-director of the Center for Health and
Humanitarian Logistics, and Pinar
Keskinocak participated in the invitation-only Supply Chain Thought
Leaders Roundtable in Breda, Netherlands in July.
- Roshan
Joseph Vengazhiyil, associate professor, gave an invited
presentation titled "Multi-Layer Designs for Computer
Experiments" at the 73rd Annual Meeting of the Institute of
Mathematical Statistics” in Gothenberg, Sweden, from August 9-13, 2010.
Continent of South America
- John
Bartholdi, Manhattan Associates Chair of
Supply Chain Management and Research Director, The Supply Chain &
Logistics Institute and Greg
Andrews, managing director of EMIL-SCS, spoke at the SALA Logistics
Conference in Bogota, Columbia, in August.
- Julie
Swann,
associate professor and co-director of the Center for Health and
Humanitarian Logistics, attended the ALIO/INFORMS Conference in Buenos
Aires, Argentina, in June. Swann gave a talk titled, “Modeling Seasonality
and Strain Mutation in a Pandemic Influenza,” which she co-authored with
ISyE professor Pinar Keskinocak, professor, co-director of the Center for Health and
Humanitarian Logistics, and associate director of Research for the Health
Systems Institute as well as Bruce
Lee from the University of Pittsburgh and Pengyi Shi from Georgia Tech.
- H.
Donald Ratliff, executive director of the Supply Chain
& Logistics Institute (SCL) and UPS and Regents' Professor, and Jaymie Forrest, SCL presented to the Inter-American Development
Bank and IIRSA committee in Lima, Peru, on the design and development of
training programs for public sector logistics and hosted a technical discussion
on data collection and analysis for regional sector studies in May.
- H. Donald
Ratliff collaborated with the WorldBank and forum on
creating a new methodology for developing a Logistics Performance Index
Global Indicator.
Continent of North America
- Christos Alexopoulos, associate
professor, and Dave Goldsman,
professor, attended IIE Annual Conference and Expo in Cancún, Mexico, in June,
where they received the IIE Transactions' Best Paper Prize in
Operations Engineering and Analysis for their paper “Area Variance Estimators
for Simulation Using Folded Standardized Time Series.” Alexopoulos and Goldsman
co-authored the paper with their former doctoral student, Claudia Antonini, tenured associate professor at Simón Bolívar
University in Caracas, Venezuela, and James
R. Wilson, professor in the Edward P. Fitts Department of Industrial and
Systems Engineering at North Carolina State University.
- Carlo Davila, PhD student, gave a talk
in at the Institute of Industrial Engineers Annual Conference in Mexico.
- Joel Sokol, associate professor, attend
the Institute of Industrial Engineers Annual Conference in Mexico and presented
the talk “A New Paradigm for Higher Quality and More Consistent Senior
(Capstone) Design,” which he co-authored with Steve Hackman, associate professor, and Chen Zhou, associate chair for Undergraduate Studies and
associate professor. While there, he received the Award for Excellence
in the Teaching of Operations Research.
- The Supply Chain & Logistic Institute
team assisted the Cold Chain Secretariat of Panama to develop a cold chain
strategy in June. They will continue to
support this initiative throughout the year.
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- Created By: Edie Cohen
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- Created On: Oct 26, 2010 - 8:36am
- Last Updated: Oct 7, 2016 - 11:07pm
Jane Ammons chaired an international review team that evaluated IE and management programs at universities and colleges throughout Israel.
John Bartholdi in front of a UNICEF truck in Zimbabwe carrying textbooks for distribution to schools throughout the country.
2011 EMIL-SCS Class visits Audi in Ingolstadt, Germany.