Dec 24: Shashaani will be an Associate Editor of the Journal of Simulation in 2025. The Journal of Simulation is the leading journal in the field of simulation, publishing articles from researchers and practitioners on the techniques, tools, methods, and technologies of simulation, as well as on novel simulation applications.

Dec 24: Shashaani group’s 2024 WSC presence:

  1. Sunday Dec 15:
    • SimOpt workshop (Shashaani, Felice, Jeon, Eun)
  2. Monday Dec 16:
    • Binary simulation optimization with rapid screening and partitioning
    • Introductory tutorial on simulation optimization methodology
  3. Tuesday Dec 17:
    • Calibrating digital twins with root finding (Jeon)
    • Distributionally robust optimization in queuing systems with Kingman distance (Eun)
  4. Wednesday Dec 18:
    • Repeated simulation optimization with data farming (Felice)

Nov 24: Eun selected as one of the winners of the 2024 Winter Simulation Conference Diversity Award! Congrats HK!

Nov 24: Project on Uncertainty Quantification for Irrigation and Lagoon Management with collaborators from College of Agriculture and College of Science is selected for integration in NC Ag Analytics Platform Initiative in Partnership with NCSU, NC A&T, and SAS

Oct 24: Paper “Complexity of Zeroth- and First-Order Stochastic Trust-Region Algorithms” received minor revisions from SIAM Journal of Optimization.

Oct 24: The group has five talks at the #INFORMS2024 in Seattle. Stop by if you are at the conference:

  1. SC31 (Methods for Large-Scale Nonlinear and Stochastic Optimization I), Summit – 442: High Efficiency in Stochastic Trust Regions
  2. ME44 (Derivative-free Simulation Optimization), Summit – 436: Efficiency Analysis of Simulation Optimization with Dynamic Stratification
  3. ME44 (Derivative-free Simulation Optimization), Summit – 436: Calibrating Digital Twin via Bayesian Optimization: A root-finding strategy
  4. ME44 (Derivative-free Simulation Optimization), Summit – 436: Comparative Analysis of Distance Metrics in Distributionally Robust Optimization for Queuing Systems: Wasserstein vs. Kingman
  5. TE01 (Explainable AI for prognostics), Summit – 320: Strata design for variance reduction in stochastic simulation

Oct 24: Paper “Strata Design for Variance Reduction in Stochastic Simulation” is now available in Technometrics online.

Oct 24: Two papers accepted for publication:

  • “Strata Design for Variance Reduction in Stochastic Simulation” by Park, Ko, Shashaani, and Byon was accepted in INFORMS Technometrics. (available online)
  • “Uncertainty Quantification using Simulation Output: Batching as an Inferential Device” by Jeon, Chu, Pasupathy and Shashaani was accepted in Journal of Simulation.

Sep 24: Paper by Ha, Shashaani, and Menickelly, “Two-stage Sampling and Variance Modeling for Variational Quantum Algorithms“, accepted for publication in INFORMS Journal on Computing.

Jul 24: Shashaani and collaborators, Rachunok and Kern are the winners of U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Electricity (OE) Phase 1 Track 1 of the Digitizing Utilities Prize. The project is about providing estimates of likely future severe weather outages with sufficient lead time to make timely staffing and crew dispatching decisions, partnering with North Carolina’s Electric Cooperatives (NCEC), which has identified winter ice storms and summer thunderstorms, tropical storms, and lower-intensity hurricanes as among their most difficult-to-staff challenges.

Jul 24: Paper  “Data Farming the Parameters of Simulation-Optimization Solvers” accepted for publication in the Transactions on Modeling and Computer Simulation.

Jul 24: Research project “Collaborative Research: Elements: A Computational and Data-Capable Environment for Stochastic Simulation Optimization” funded by the National Science Foundation OAC-CSSI (Cyberinfrastructure for Sustained Scientific Innovation). Shashaani and collaborators Eckman and Henderson will start immediately for this exciting three-year project to expand the SimOpt library.

Jun 2024: Four papers, on nested partitioning, digital twins, data farming for optimization, and new metrics for distributionally robust optimization, were accepted for publication in 2024 Proceedings of Winter Simulation Conference.

May 24: Paper “Risk Score Models for Urinary Tract Infection Hospitalization” with Shashaani and Vahdat as co-authors is accepted for publication in PLOS ONE.

May 24: Shashaani is awarded a grant for a three-year project on “Fast and Scalable Stochastic Derivative-free Optimization” from Office of Naval Research. Shashaani will lead this effort seeking to excel stochastic optimization in theory and practice for black-box noisy problems of large scales.

Apr 24: last day of an awesome class with these guys learning (almost) everything about simulation optimization

Apr 24: Jain unconditionally passes his Final defense! He developed fast sampling techniques to handle big data when calibrating computer models and used his methods to help with wind power generation. Congrats Pranav!!

Apr 24: The group had a good night at the 2024 ISE CA Anderson Awards.

Ha received the ISE Distinguished Dissertation Award, which recognizes recent PhD graduates who have written original, innovative dissertations that reflect outstanding technical contributions and are likely to have significant scientific and societal impact! He will be the department’s nominee for the IISE Pritsker Dissertation Award and/or INFORMS Dantzig Dissertation Award. (Jeon-Ha’s friend, teammate and basketball buddy) received the award on Ha’s behalf as he was traveling. Congratulations Yunsoo!!

Shashaani received the ISE Faculty Scholar Award, which recognizes current ISE (tenure track) assistant and associate professors for excellence in research, teaching, and service over the past three calendar years and the potential for becoming a University Faculty Scholar.