June 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
![](https://shashaani.wordpress.ncsu.edu/files/2024/05/IMG_1551-1142x800.jpg)
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!!
![](https://shashaani.wordpress.ncsu.edu/files/2024/04/pranav-defense.jpg)
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.
![](https://shashaani.wordpress.ncsu.edu/files/2024/04/awards-night-574x800.png)
Apr 24: Shashaani and Houser celebrating last session of Simulation Modeling class! Students are now to work on their final project–simulating a made-to-order Mexican food restaurant. Can simulations helps us identify what is the bottleneck in Chipotle queue? Good luck students and looking forward to your simulation!!
PS: Thank you TAs Ethan Houser and Nicole Felice for all your help!
![](https://shashaani.wordpress.ncsu.edu/files/2024/04/IMG_1513-988x800.jpg)
Apr 24: Houser presents his research on robust and fast feature selection with screening and partitioning methods at the 2024 NC State Graduate Student Research Symposium. His poster will be added to the groups website!
![](https://shashaani.wordpress.ncsu.edu/files/2024/04/IMG_1497-1067x800.jpg)
Mar 24: Ha presented First Order Trust Region Methods with Adaptive Sampling at the 2nd INFORMS Optimization Society’s Conference in Houston, TX.
Mar 24: Shashaani to present a tutorial on Simulation Optimization in 2024 Winter Simulation Conference at Orlando!
Mar 24: Paper “Iteration Complexity and Finite-Time Efficiency of Adaptive Sampling Trust-Region Methods for Stochastic Derivative-Free Optimization” accepted for publication in IISE Transactions.
March 2024: Paper “Building Trees for Probabilistic Prediction via Scoring Rules” is tentatively accepted at Technometrics
Jan 24: New paper “Robust Variational Quantum Algorithms Incorporating Hamiltonian Uncertainty” submitted.
Jan 24: New paper “Two-stage Estimation and Variance Modeling for Variational Quantum Algorithms” submitted.
Jan 24: New paper “Simulation Model Calibration with Dynamic Stratification and Adaptive Sampling” submitted.
Dec 23: Shashaani selected for the Baden-Württemberg/North Carolina – Faculty Mobility Program.
Dec 23: Join the Shashaani Research Group at 2023 Winter Simulation Conference in San Antonio. WSC starts with the SimOpt workshop, co-hosted by Shashaani.
![](https://shashaani.wordpress.ncsu.edu/files/2023/12/wsc-group-schedule-750x800.png)
![](https://shashaani.wordpress.ncsu.edu/files/2024/05/yh-wsc23-600x800.jpg)
Yunsoo at PhD Colloquium Poster Session
![](https://shashaani.wordpress.ncsu.edu/files/2024/05/kv-wsc23-600x800.jpg)
Kimia at PhD Colloquium Poster Session
![](http://shashaani.wordpress.ncsu.edu/files/2024/05/group-wsc23-1067x800.jpeg)
Group Dinner by River Walk in San Antonio
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!
![](https://shashaani.wordpress.ncsu.edu/files/2023/11/Screenshot-2023-11-22-at-10.52.27-AM-1200x675.png)
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.