Dr. Ault's research centers on theoretical and applied population and community dynamics, and statistical assessment and management of tropical marine fishery ecosystems.  A particularly unique aspect is the development of large-scale spatial coupled biophysical ecosystem simulation models to assess the response of multispecies fisheries to exploitation and environmental changes.  Requirements for fishery management have fundamentally changed so that fruitful areas of research now transcend the bounds of traditional assessment theory and new approaches must be explored. The fishery management system is a new approach to integrate quantitative techniques in population dynamics, sampling design, fish stock assessment, operations research, biometrics, numerical modeling, scientific visualization, and management science in a computer- based expert decision support system to provide cost-effective high-precision fish stock assessments and short-term fishery forecasts.

Dimitris Bertsimas is currently the Boeing Leaders for Global Operations Professor of Management and the codirector of the Operations Research Center at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He has received a BS in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the National Technical University of Athens, Greece in 1985, a MS in Operations Research at MIT in 1987, and a Ph.D in Applied Mathematics and Operations Research at MIT in 1988.  Since 1988, he has been in the MIT faculty. His research interests include optimization, stochastic systems, data mining, and their application. In recent years he has worked in robust optimization, health care and finance.

Manoj Saxena is General Manager, Watson Solutions, IBM Software Group. He has global responsibility for the commercialization and scaling of IBM Watson based industry solutions including strategic leadership, operations, and client relationships. 

Prior to joining IBM in 2006, Manoj successfully founded, scaled, and sold two venture-backed software companies within a five year span: Webify, an emerging leader in industry-specific SOA middleware, was acquired by IBM in 2006 and Commerce One bought Exterprise, a business process collaboration company in 2001.

An active community contributor, Manoj serves on the Board of Any Baby Can, Austin Technology Council, and Saxena Family Foundation. He also holds numerous other Advisory Board positions including Global Giving, St Edwards University Business School, and Michigan State University’s Center for Venture Capital, Private Equity and Entrepreneurial Finance.

A frequent speaker at industry and business conferences, Manoj is the recipient of multiple awards including “Entrepreneur of the Year”, “IT Technologist of the Year”, and the “Distinguished Alumni Award” from Michigan State University from where he received his MBA in 1991. 

David Alderson
Assistant Professor of Operations Research
Naval Postgraduate School
Profile

David L. Alderson joined the Naval Postgraduate School faculty in 2006 after working for three years as a postdoctoral scholar in the Division of Engineering and Applied Sciences at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech). He received a B.S.E. in Civil Engineering and Operations Research from Princeton University and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from the Department of Management Science and Engineering at Stanford University. His research focuses on the function and operation of critical infrastructures, with particular emphasis on how to invest limited resources to ensure efficient and resilient performance in the face of accidents, failures, natural disasters, or deliberate attacks. He currently serves as the Director of the NPS Center for Infrastructure Defense (CID). As part of a Multiple University Research Initiative (MURI) team studying "Next-Generation Network Science," he studies tradeoffs between efficiency, complexity, and fragility in a wide variety of public and private network-centric systems. He has extensive experience working on the Internet and other complex communication networks, having been a researcher at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), the Santa Fe Institute (SFI), and the Institute for Pure and Applied Mathematics (IPAM) at UCLA. He is a member of INFORMS and MORS, and holds a SECRET clearance.

Suvrajeet Sen
Professor, Integrated Systems Engineering Department
The Ohio State University
Profile

Presentation Slides (PDF version)
Presentation Slides (PowerPoint version)

Suvrajeet Sen joined OSU as Professor in 2006. Recently, he also served as a program director at NSF where he was responsible for the Operations Research, and the Service Enterprise Engineering programs. At NSF, he also headed the Cyberinfrastructure planning activities of the Engineering Directorate. Concurrently with his appointment at NSF, he was a professor of Systems and Industrial Engineering at the University of Arizona. Professor Sen has served on the editorial board of several journals, including Operations Research as Area Editor for Optimization, and as Associate Editor in INFORMS Journal on Computing, Telecommunications Systems, as well as Operations Research. He is the past-Chair of the INFORMS Telecommunications Section and founded the INFORMS Optimization Section. Professor Sen is a Fellow of INFORMS. His research interests include large-scale and stochastic optimization, integer programming, and applications in infrastructure systems, including cyber, power, and transportation.