Computational Transportation Science

CTS Events

SEMINAR
November 14, 2012

Dr. Nebiyou Tilahun, UPP, presents a seminar entitled "An agent based model of origin destination estimation (ADOBE)" Wednesday, November 14th at 4:00 pm in Rm 1127 SEO

SEMINAR
November 7, 2012

Mr. Thomas Murtha, CMAP, will address the CTS-IGERT community at 4:00 p.m. in Room 1127 SEO.

SEMINAR
October 24, 2012

Please join us in welcoming Dr. Bo Zou, CME, on Wednesday, October 24th, Room 1127 SEO, 4:00 p.m.

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CTS Happenings

September 25, 2012

Award Received by Joshua Auld, CTS-IGERT alumnus.

April 20, 2012

Congratulations to James Biagioni, CTS Fellow and CS PhD candidate, winner of the Dean's Scholar award.

January 2, 2012

James Biagioni, CTS Fellow, receives "Best Presentation Award" at SenSys2011

July 30, 2010

Dr. Ouri Wolfson, Dr. Phillip Yu, and Leon Stenneth, CS student and CTS Associate, recently had a paper accepted to the 6th IEEE International Conference on Wireless and Mobile Computing, Networking and Communications (WiMob 2010).

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February 11, 2011

Dr. Amitabh Chaudhary, Assistant Professor,Computer Science and Engineering, University of Notre Dame, will present a seminar entitled "Online Algorithms for the Newsvendor Problem", February 11th, 2:30 p.m., Room 1000 SEO

Abstract: Imagine you are a newspaper vendor who orders papers every morning at $1 each, and sells them during the day at $2 each. Papers left unsold at the end of the day are, however, worthless and cannot be sold the following day. How many papers will you order if you do not know what the demand during the day is going to be? This is the newsvendor problem from operations research, which arises in the supply chain planning of several goods and services. The traditional approach to the problem is to model the unknown demand stochastically and choose order quantities that maximize the expected-case profit. But for several products such as fashion apparel, supermarket perishables, consumer electronics, and even certain vaccines, stochastic models are often grossly inaccurate and result in losses of billions of dollars across several industries.

In this talk we shall present the first online algorithms for the newsvendor problem, which have a guaranteed performance even the worst-case. They are combinatorial in nature and inspired from ideas in computational learning theory. Unlike online algorithms for caching or scheduling, our performance guarantees are not in terms of the offline optimal, but a weaker adversary, the offline static optimal. This adversary "knows the future" but is allowed only a single order choice for all days in the input sequence. It is easy to show that no online algorithm can have a reasonable competitive ratio in terms of the offline optimal for the newsvendor problem. We shall also present experimental results on simulated and real-world data. They indicate that our algorithms perform comparably and often better than known approaches.

Biography: Amitabh Chaudhary received a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore. He is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Notre Dame since 2005. Before this he was an Associate Specialist in the Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences at University of California, Irvine. Dr. Chaudhary's research is directed at the design, analysis, and application of algorithms, primarily online algorithms—algorithms that compute under incomplete information. His algorithms have addressed fundamental problems in resource allocation, distributed databases, scientific computing, network routing, fault-tolerance, spatial data management, inventory control, and graph theory. His recent work is in designing algorithms for the notorious newsvendor problem in supply chain management, and in developing efficient caching solutions for dynamic data in scientific databases. He has over 35 publications in high-impact journals and conferences. He has reviewed for several journals and served on the program committees of a number of conferences. He is a member of the ACM and IEEE. He has received research grants from the NSF and a National Scholarship from NCERT, India. Recently he received the Outstanding Teacher Award from his department at the University of Notre Dame.