We will host three Keynote sessions on Sunday afternoon in succession, followed by a Welcome Party. We hope you can join us for an engaging start to the conference and meaningful networking opportunities.
From Monday to Friday, there will be three parallel sessions running from morning to evening, featuring a wide variety of presentations. We are also planning some social activities!
Given the updated start on Sunday, we highly recommend booking your travel to arrive in Okinawa by Saturday. We encourage you to adjust your plans to fully participate in all Sunday activities.
Professor at Northwestern University, USA
Dr. Karen Smilowitz is the James N. and Margie M. Krebs Professor in Industrial Engineering and Management Science at Northwestern University, with a joint appointment in the Operations group at the Kellogg School of Management. Dr. Smilowitz is an expert in modeling and solution approaches for logistics and transportation systems in both commercial and nonprofit applications. She has been instrumental in promoting the use of operations research within the humanitarian and nonprofit sectors through the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the National Academy of Engineering, as well as various media outlets. Dr. Smilowitz is the Editor-in-Chief of Transportation Science and a Fellow of the INFORMS society.
Dr. Smilowitz has worked on several projects in the area of operational improvement in community-based health care. Community-based operations research is the application of decision models to social issues of a local nature. The goal of this field is to design policies and tactics that have the potential to improve individual life outcomes and neighborhood-level outcomes by addressing welfare, equity and administrative efficiency simultaneously.
Professor at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Switzerland
Michel Bierlaire holds a PhD in Mathematical Sciences from the University of Namur, Belgium. From 1995 to 1998, he served as a research associate and project manager at the Intelligent Transportation Systems Program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT, Cambridge, Ma). Following this, he joined the Operations Research group ROSO within the Institute of Mathematics at EPFL as junior faculty, a position he held from 1998 to 2006. In 2006, he was appointed Associate Professor in the School of Architecture, Civil and Environmental Engineering at EPFL, where he now directs the Transport and Mobility Laboratory. In 2012, he was appointed full professor in the same school.
Dr. Bierlaire’s expertise lies in the design, development, and application of models and algorithms for transportation system analysis, design, and management. His work includes significant contributions to demand modeling, such as discrete choice models and the estimation of origin-destination matrices, as well as operations research topics like scheduling and assignment, and dynamic traffic management systems.
He is the founder of hEART, the European Association for Research in Transportation. Additionally, he served as the founding Editor-in-Chief of the EURO Journal on Transportation and Logistics from 2011 to 2019 and has been an Associate Editor of Operations Research since 2012.
Professor at University of Michigan, USA