Dear alumni and friends,
It’s been a year since I started my term as director. While higher education has faced many challenges over this past year, there are many exciting things that have happened in our department as well.
Many of you have already read the news that Cornell Engineering is now the Cornell David A. Duffield College of Engineering in recognition of alumnus David Duffield ’62 MBA ’64 and his generous support over the years. What you may not know is that David Duffield has publicly cited faculty members and ORIE Ph.D. alumni Dick Conway ’54 Ph.D. ’58 and William Maxwell ’57 Ph.D. ’61 as important influences. We’re proud of the impact that our faculty and graduates have had on the world.
For the past decade, we’ve been hiring faculty whose research connects our field with topics in data science, machine learning, and artificial intelligence. We’ve had especially fruitful hiring seasons in the last two years and many of those faculty are just now starting their jobs in the department. We’ve hired junior faculty at the start of their careers, including Yuchen Wu and Nikita Doikov, as well as several faculty who started their careers at other institutions, including Shoham Sabach from the Technion and Amazon, Linwei Xin from Chicago’s Booth School of Business, and Jessica Rush Leeker from the University of Colorado at Boulder. We’re very excited to have them all aboard! You can read more about their interests and backgrounds in this issue.
At the same time, we’re saying goodbye to some long-time faculty members. In particular, Jim Renegar, who has been a part of the department for almost 40 years, retired this past summer. Jim has done amazing work in optimization over the course of his career and served the department as one of its directors. We will miss you, Jim!
We’re also very pleased to announce a ‘focused elective’ in ‘Data, Decisions, and AI’ for our undergraduate majors. We’ve launched some new courses connecting topics in operations research and artificial intelligence, and we have recommended a set of classes that students can take if they are interested in this area. In particular, we’re starting a new course on the optimization methods that get used to create AI models, and we’ve introduced another course on a technique called reinforcement learning and showing how it applies to traditional problems in operations research such as inventory theory. More courses like these are on their way.
One of the pleasures of the job has been meeting many of our extraordinary alumni who have taken their backgrounds in operations research in so many different directions, and you can read about one of them in this magazine: Jason Erdell ’95. Jason’s work took him to Hewlett Packard, the Gap, and now MDPanel, which applies AI and machine learning to medical opinions. He was invited recently to give a presentation in the Cheng Distinguished Lecture Series.
It is a privilege for me to serve as the director of ORIE. I have enjoyed talking to many of you. I hope you will reach out to me if you have questions or ideas you would like to share. I am grateful for the many ways in which you continue to support the department and its students and faculty.
David Williamson
Director of the School of Operations Research and Information Engineering
Class of 1912 Professor of Engineering