OR62 Plenary Speakers

The OR62 Online organisers are proud to announce three plenary speakers, featuring plenary sessions by some of the world’s leading thinkers and innovators in their field. Each speaker will make formal 60-minute presentations.

Dimitris Bertsimas, MIT

Talk Title: Interpretable AI

11:15 - 12:15 | Tuesday 15 September 2020

We introduce a new generation of machine learning methods that provide state of the art performance and are very interpretable. We introduce optimal classification (OCT) and regression (ORT) trees for prediction and prescription with and without hyperplanes. We show that:-

(a) Trees are very interpretable;
(b) They can be calculated in large scale in practical times and;
(c) In a large collection of real world data sets they give comparable or better performance than random forests or boosted trees.

Their prescriptive counterparts have a significant edge on interpretability and comparable or better performance than causal forests. Finally, we show that optimal trees with hyperplanes have at least as much modeling power as (feedforward, convolutional and recurrent) neural networks and comparable performance in a variety of real world data sets.

These results suggest that optimal trees are interpretable, practical to compute in large scale and provide state of the art performance compared to black box methods. We apply these methods to a large collection of examples in personalized medicine, financial services, organ transplantation among others.  

Watch video

Ellen D. Lewis, PhD

Talk Title: Inclusive Systemic Evaluation: Deepening Understandings of Engagement and Community

13:00 - 14:00 | Wednesday 16 September 2020

Inclusive Systemic Evaluation is an emerging evaluation approach, developed in partnership with UN Women. It is designed to deal with the complexity of applying the UN Sustainable Development Goals.

Inclusive Systemic Evaluation is grounded in a key principle of Community OR (COR): that ‘engagement’ and ‘community’ need to be defined in a locally meaningful way to address complex cultural, organizational, social and environmental issues.

In a global development context, Inclusive Systemic Evaluation is part of a larger response to shifting development actors (e.g. donors, multilateral organizations, NGOs and participants) away from narrow understandings of stakeholders and context to a more inclusive process of economic and social development.

Each intervention is seen as an opportunity for people to learn about how to build gender equality, sustainability, and socio-economic justice into action for social change.

Watch Video

Dr Patrick M. Reed

Talk Title: Conflict, Coordination & Control: Do We Understand the Actual Rules Used to Balance Flooding, Energy, and Agricultural Tradeoffs in River Basins?

14:15 - 15:15 | Thursday 17 September 2020

Multi-reservoir systems require adaptive control policies capable of managing evolving hydroclimatic variability and human demands across a wide range of time scales. However, traditional operating rules are static, ignoring the potential for coordinated information sharing to reduce conflicts between multi-sectoral river basin demands. This study shows how recent advances in multi-objective control enable the design of coordinated operating policies that continuously adapt as a function of evolving hydrologic information.

The benefits of the proposed control innovations are demonstrated for the Red River basin of Vietnam, where four major reservoirs serve to protect the capital of Hanoi from flooding, while also supplying farmers with irrigable water supply and the surrounding region with electric power. Operating policies recently proposed by the Vietnamese government seek to improve coordination and adaptivity in the Red River using a conditional if/then/else rule system that triggers alternative control actions using information on current storage and recent hydrology. However, these simple, discontinuous rules fail to protect Hanoi to even the 100-yr flood.

Our policy diagnostics using time-varying sensitivity analysis illustrate how our proposed operations make better use of coordinated system information to reduce food-energy-water conflicts in the basin. These findings accentuate the need to transition from static rule curves to dynamic operating policies in order to manage evolving hydroclimatic variability and socioeconomic change. 

Watch Video