Speakers



Dr. Jeffrey Carver

University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa AL

BIO: Dr. Jeffrey Carver is a Professor Computer Science at the University of Alabama. He is the Chair of the University of Alabama Cyber Initiative. He serves on the Alabama Commission Artificial Intelligence & Associated Technologies. He earned his PhD from the University of Maryland. His research interests include Software Engineering, Empirical Methods, Software Engineering for Research Software, and Human Factors. He is one of the primary organizers of the SE4Science Workshop series, focused on interactions between Software Engineering Researchers and developers of Research Software. He is a Senior Member of the IEEE and the ACM.

TALK TITLE: Software Engineering For Research Software

ABSTRACT: Increasingly research advances are enabled by Research Software (i.e. software that enables research in various disciplines). The characteristics of this software and the fact that the researchers who develop it are often domain experts but not necessarily software engineering (SE) experts, results in a need to understand how to identify and apply appropriate SE practices for high-quality and sustainable software. This talk focuses on work done to advance this understanding through surveys and case studies. The talk will also describe the efforts of an ongoing project to design a US Research Software Sustainability Institute (URSSI), which includes a number of workshops and a large-scale survey.

WEB PAGE: http://carver.cs.ua.edu/

Dr. Huseyin Ergin

Ball State University, Muncie IN

BIO: Dr. Huseyin Ergin is an assistant professor of Computer Science Department at Ball State University. He pursued his Ph.D. in Computer Science at the University of Alabama. His research interests include software engineering, model-driven engineering, and model transformation. He worked in various industries as a software developer including the R&D department at Huawei Telecommunications, the IT department at Mercedes-Benz US International, a smart shopping assistant startup called Mona, and a wedding ring manufacturing company called Benchmark. His projects in these companies gave him an extensive look at the software development practices in various settings. He has been in the organization committee of successful local programming and robotics competitions and camps. Lately, he is closely working with industry partners on software engineering techniques and practices.

TALK TITLE: A Study of Software Development Practice in Operations Research (in collaboration with Dr. Mesut Yavuz)

ABSTRACT: Software is a crucial part of research in many fields today. However, software development is not an easy task. Primarily it is harder in fields where researchers are not formally trained to produce better software systematically. In this talk, we will share the results of a survey we have been conducting for the last ten months. The results of the survey will shed light on the software development practice in Operations Research (OR), reveal the relationship of the OR scholars with research software, and present the expectations and concerns of them regarding code and data sharing practices.

WEB PAGE: http://www.cs.bsu.edu/~hergin/

Dr. John W. Chinneck

Carleton University, Ottawa ON

BIO: John W. Chinneck is a Professor Emeritus in the Department of Systems and Computer Engineering at Carleton University in Ottawa Canada. He was the Editor-in-Chief of the INFORMS Journal on Computing 2007-2012. He was awarded the 2017 COIN-OR Cup for the development of global optimization software along with his graduate students and received the Canadian Operational Research Society Award of Merit in the same year. His algorithms for the analysis of infeasibility have been incorporated into most commercial LP solvers. For further information, please check his webpage.

TALK TITLE: 40 Years of Operations Research Software Development: Lessons Learned

ABSTRACT: Advice and hard lessons learned during 40 years of developing algorithmic software for operations research. Things to consider when embarking on a new project: programming and modelling languages, basic numerical methods, solvers, software libraries, test sets, experiment design, etc.

WEB PAGE: https://carleton.ca/sce/people/chinneck/

Dr. Mesut Yavuz

University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa AL

BIO: Dr. Mesut Yavuz is an associate professor of Operations Management in Culverhouse College of Commerce and Business Administration. A native of Turkey, he received his B.S. and M.S. degrees from Istanbul Technical University, and later his PhD. from the University of Florida. Upon teaching at the University of Florida and Shenandoah University for 9 years, Dr. Yavuz joined Culverhouse in 2014. His research is in the broad areas of manufacturing scheduling, sustainable transportation, and energy. His research has been supported by public and private agencies and has been published in journals including Manufacturing & Service Operations Management and Transportation Science.

TALK TITLE: A New Computational Optimization Framework (in collaboration with Dr. Huseyin Ergin)

ABSTRACT: We present a new framework consisting of libraries enabling faster development and experimentation in computational optimization. We demonstrate the use of the framework on a parallel-machine-scheduling problem and highlight the improvements obtained from using the framework.

WEB PAGE: http://myavuz.people.ua.edu/