Innovating Mathematics for New Industrial Challenges
Conference Programme
Building on the success of the two previous conferences held in 2017 and 2019 this conference will draw together the considerable community of researchers and practitioners who develop new mathematics of relevance to, and which underpin applications in Operational Research (OR). It will take a comprehensive view, it will showcase activity from across OR, and will welcome both contributions which have a clear application focus as well as those which are theoretically driven. Contributions will be expected to showcase both significant new mathematics and OR relevance. The conference will host plenaries from leading international experts.
This Conference has been arranged with The Operational Research Society.
This Conference has been organised in cooperation with The Alan Turing Institute.
Invited Speakers
Jakob Blaavand (The Smith Institute)
Kevin Glazebrook & Jake Clarkson (Lancaster University)
Nick Harris (Dstl)
Dolores Romero Morales (Copenhagen Business School)
Christina Pagel (Clinical OR Unit)
Professor Edmund Burke (University of Leicester), President of the Operational Research Society and Dr Nira Chamberlain (SNC-Lavalin Atkins), President of the Institute of Mathematics and its Applications will be giving the opening speech on the morning of the 20th April 2021.
Talk Titles and Abstracts
Jakob Blaavand (The Smith Institute) – Create impact with Maths and OR
What does a vehicle dispatcher, a board member at Coca-Cola European Partners and an electricity network control engineer have in common? They all rely on the results of models and algorithms from the Smith Institute to support their decision making. At the Smith Institute we create value and actionable insight for our clients by solving their most complex problems using data, models, and algorithms.
In this talk, we will discuss how to successfully apply mathematics, statistics, and operations research to create value and insight in a business context. We will together take the journey from problem identification to solution design, implementation and finally measuring impact of the results in a recent case study in the transport sector. We will stop along the way to dig into some of the mathematical details of the solution and its implementation. Through the journey, we will see how bringing data, models, and algorithms together can create an impact in businesses by unlocking value and insight.
Kevin Glazebrook & Jake Clarkson (Lancaster University) – Index Policies and Search Games
It is nearly fifty years since the elucidation by Gittins and Jones of index‐based solutions to a class of multi‐armed bandit problems. This now classical result raised the prospect that good (sometimes optimal) solutions to important classes of sequential decision problems might be solved by the simple expedient of attaching to each decision option a calibrating index capturing both the immediate and future benefits associated with that option. Over the ensuing five decades, both the associated mathematical ideas and the range of applications impacted have seen considerable development. The talk will present key ideas which have proved influential along with some very recent work related to search games.
Nick Harris (Dstl) – An Analyst in Lockdown
As analysts the COVID pandemic has provided the backdrop for a very unusual year. It has not only challenged our personal circumstance, it has also shaped how we deliver our work. I am a Senior Principal Analyst in the Civil Service with a career designing, delivering and reviewing Operational Research used to inform a wide range of decisions. I am currently working in the Defence Science and Technology Laboratory (Dstl), an Executive Agency of the Ministry of Defence, and during my career approaches and techniques for providing and assuring analysis have continued to evolve and develop. During the pandemic the demand for analysis has remained, and as you would expect there has also been a massive new demand for analysts to help inform decision making in response to the COVID crisis. In parallel to this increased demand the constraints on our ways of working has required very different approaches.
In this presentation I draw on experiences from my career, and in particular focus on what the pandemic has meant to my work. During the presentation I will:
- explore implications of working from home – including the adoption of ’Zoom’ culture;
- although I am not going to talk about specific results or policy decisions, I will discuss the demands of quality assuring analysis provided by Dstl to support the national response to the pandemic;
- discuss Dstl’s approach to technical assurance during the crisis; and
- comment on the opportunities for analysis to make a real difference.
In conclusion I will speculate on what this means for the future. There are certainly aspects of ways of working from before the pandemic that we will want to return to, but there are also a lot of positive lessons that we may also be able build on.
Dolores Romero Morales (Copenhagen Business School) – Data-Driven Decision-Making Needs More Transparency. Optimization Can Help
Despite excellent accuracy, state-of-the-art Data Science models are effectively acting as black boxes, which hinders model validation and may hide unfair outcomes for risk groups. There is a growing literature on enhancing the transparency of Data Science methods. Transparency is required by regulators for models aiding, for instance, credit scoring, and since 2018 the EU has extended this requirement by imposing the so-called right-to-explanation in algorithmic decision-making. Mathematical Optimization has a crucial role when striking a balance between transparency and accuracy, having LASSO as one of the main exponents. In this presentation, we will navigate through some novel techniques embedded in the construction of Data Science models to enhance their transparency. This includes the ability to provide global, local and counterfactual explanations, as well as model cost-sensitivity and fairness requirements.
Christina Pagel (Clinical OR Unit) – The Intersection of Operational Research and Public Communication during the Covid-19 Pandemic
In May 2020 I joined the group Independent SAGE. At the time, I thought I was signing up to one or two public meetings on YouTube, but instead our profile grew and we discovered there was a large public appetite for more information about Covid and its spread in the UK. From the summer onwards, I have been giving regular updates on the latest Covid situation in the UK during Independent SAGE weekly briefings and have been invited regularly on the media fielding questions about various aspects of the Covid pandemic. In this talk, I will reflect on how my experience of working in Operational Research applied to health care has shaped how I have understood and communicated the Covid pandemic over the past year. This ranges from thinking through problem definition and unintended consequences, combining knowledge across different disciplines to deciding on where the information lies in the data and how best to present it.
WORAN (Women in OR and Analytics Network) Panel – Gender imbalance: what can be done?
On Wednesday 21 April at 13.00 Conference organisers and diversity champions from the IMA and OR Society will host a discussion on the gender imbalance in Operational Research and Analytics and will call on the audience for contributions and further discussion. What do you think are the issues to be addressed? do you think we should be doing different things, or doing things differently? and what do you suggest needs to be done, by whom? These questions are important to everybody in the maths and OR community because they impact on all of us, as colleagues, learners, and teachers. Please join us to discuss them, and help make future conferences more diverse. A full abstract for this Panel can be found here.
Conference Fees
Non Member – £35.00 per day
IMA/OR Member – £25.00 per day
Non Student Member – £15.00 per day
IMA/OR Student Member – £10.00 per day
If you are an OR Member or Student Member please contact the Conferences Team if you have issues booking the reduced fee.
The fees go towards covering staff costs, and the cost of software licence fees required to run the conference.
Registration
Registration for this event is now closed.
Organising Committee
Daniel Tilley (BuddyHub)
Joerg Fliege (University of Southampton)
Adam Letchford (Lancaster University)
Ruth Kaufman (The Operational Research Society)
John Medhurst (Larrainzar Consulting Solutions)
Further information:
For general conference queries please contact Maya Everson, Conference Officer
email: conferences@ima.org.uk tel: +44 (0) 1702 354 020
Institute of Mathematics and its Applications, Catherine Richards House, 16 Nelson Street, Southend-on-Sea, Essex, SS1 1EF, UK.
Conference arranged with:
