Group News – Page 2 – Shashaani Research Group

Nov 23: Ha successfully defends his PhD dissertation and receives an unconditional pass from the committee. He will next be joining the National Laboratory of Renewable Energy as a postdoc working with a computational optimization group. Congratulations Dr. Ha!

Nov 23: Shashaani and colleagues from Biological & Agricultural Engineering and Marine, Earth and Atmospheric Sciences win a 1-year grant from NC Department of Justice to minimize impacts of climate variability on NC swine farms through the use of simulations and decision-making under uncertainty

Nov 2023: New paper “Statistical Inference on Simulation Output: Batching as an Inferential Device” with Y. Jeon and R. Pasupathy submitted.

Oct 23: Ha presents oracle complexity with adaptive sampling at the Midwest Optimization Meeting held at the University of Michigan:

Oct 2023: Shashaani’s group have 5 presentations at the 2023 INFORMS annual meeting:

Sep 2023: Shashaani selected as the Southern Cross University’s International Alumnus of the Year

Aug 23: Vahdat successfully defended her PhD dissertation and will be a data analyst in Liberty Mutual after graduate school. Congratulations Kimia!

Aug 23: Paper “On Common-Random-Numbers and the Complexity of Adaptive Sampling Trust-Region Methods” with Ha and Pasupathy now available on optimization-online.

Jul 23: Paper “Building Trees for Probabilistic Prediction via Scoring Rules” with Surer, Plumlee, and Guikema submitted.

Jun 23: Paper “Strata Design in Stochastic Simulations with Multivariate Inputs” with Park, Byon, and Ko submitted.

Jun 23: Paper “Wake Effect Parameter Calibration with Large-Scale Field Operational Data using Stochastic Optimization” published in Applied Energy! Here are some highlights:

Engineering wake models have parameters that crucially affect their performance.
Wake parameters can be calibrated as constants or functions of other wind variables.
Stochastic optimization (SO) provides accurate and reliable wake calibrations.
Both point and functional calibration of wake parameters can be done well with SO.
A derivative-free trust-region SO method provides robust wake calibration.
Efficiently implemented trust-region SO uses adaptive sampling and variance reduction.
Stratifying data based on wind characteristics effectively reduces variance during SO.
Choosing strata of wind data and dynamically sampling from each expedites calibration.
Robust wake calibration helps understanding power deficit patterns in wind farms.
Good prediction of power deficit due to wake enables optimal design of new wind farms.

Jun 23: Paper “Data Farming Simulation Optimization Solver Parameters” with Eckman and Sanchez submitted.

Jun 23: Pranav Jain unconditionally passes his preliminary doctoral exam. Congratulations Pranav!

May 23: Jain to join National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) as an intern in Summer 2023.

May 23: Paper “Iteration Complexity and Finite-Time Efficiency of Adaptive Sampling Trust-Region Methods for Stochastic Derivative-Free Optimization” is submitted and accessible on arxiv.

Apr 23: Paper “Predicting Additive Manufacturing Defects with Robust Feature Selection for Imbalanced Data” accepted for publication in IISE Transactions.

Apr 23: Houser wins the ISE Shook Mentor Award

nomination excerpt: “Ethan has gone above and beyond in participating in research activities, helping other students in teaching and learning, and serving the department in any way he finds. He has mentored students in courses he has been assigned as TA to improve the quality of labs and create new material from scratch in response to what he finds to be major hurdles for students. He supports students who may need more help, spending more time than the allocated office hours and maintaining consistent accountability between the instructor and students. In graduate studies, Ethan has helped many students since 2021 including new Ph.D. students with the group and mentored the writing and editing of manuscripts. He also helped other masters and REU students temporarily working with the group with content, data, and coding. In addition, Ethan has participated in professional development activities, such as writing, presentation, and outreach for events like the engineering open house. He does all these things while maintaining excellent academic performance and high quality in the tasks assigned to him.”

Apr 23: Shashaani wins the best IISE’s Modeling & Simulation Division Annual Teaching Award. The award will be granted at the award banquet during the IISE Conference and Expo in New Orleans.

Mar 23: The group showcased ongoing research for high school visitors at the Engineering Open House station in Fitts Wollard Hall of NC State (Centennial Campus)

Yongseok Jeon and Ethan Houser at the Shashaani Research Group’s station to present high school visitors with “What is simulation?”.

Feb 23: Shashaani selected as a fellow of the Convergence Research (CORE) Institute. This fellowship will provide a solid foundation and network for the group’s future convergence research projects.