The Institute for Operations Research and Management Sciences, which recognizes
research excellence in the broad field of management science, has awarded its 2005
Pierskalla Award in health care and management science to Eva
Lee, a professor
of industrial and systems engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology.
Lee was recognized for her research in emergency treatment response and real-time
staff allocation for bioterrorism and infectious disease outbreak.
The research, a collaboration with Siddhartha Maheshwary and Dr. Jacquelyn Mason at the Centers for Disease Control, was cited as timely and innovative, advancing research frontiers of both management science and health care services. The award is named after Dr. William Pierskalla to recognize his contribution and dedication to improving health services research and delivery through operations research.
Lee's research focuses on novel mathematical modeling and computational advances for medical and biomedical investigations, developing realistic mathematical models, algorithmic strategies and clinical decision-support systems to help analyze large-scale biological, DNA/genomic and clinical data. Her medical/biomedical research includes novel pattern recognition and classification algorithms for early disease diagnosis and prediction, target therapeutic intervention and disease monitoring; analysis of clinical treatment modalities and design of optimal and combination treatment regimens, and drug delivery for cancer; and health care outcome analysis and development of prediction rules for treatment effectiveness, and design of improved treatment regimens.
In 1996, Lee received the NSF CAREER Young Investigator Award for research on integer programming and parallel algorithms. She was the recipient of the prestigious Whitaker Foundation Biomedical Grant for Young Investigators in 2000 for her work on novel biological imaging and combined optimal treatment for prostate cancer. She is the first industrial engineering researcher to receive this award. She also received an NSF Information Technology Research Award for her work on computational advances for cancer therapeutics in 2003.
She has received six patents on innovative medical systems and devices, one of which is currently under FDA review for approval for clinical use in the treatment of prostate cancer.
Lee received her undergraduate degree in Mathematics and Computer Science with highest distinction from Hong Kong Baptist University. She received her Ph.D degree in Computational and Applied Mathematics from Rice University in 1993. After graduation, she spent a year as a postdoctoral fellow in the NSF Center for Parallel Computation, and in 1995, she was an NSF/NATO postdoctoral fellow in Scientific Computing at Konrad-Zuse Zentrum Informationstechnik Berlin.
]]>The Logistics Institute (TLI), a unit of the School of Industrial and Systems
Engineering at Georgia Tech, received a $150,000 grant from The UPS Foundation,
the charitable arm of UPS (NYSE:UPS). The grant will be used to continue the UPS
Global Logistics Program at Georgia Tech. Through the UPS
Global Logistics Program over the past eight years, TLI has established
relationships and is conducting research and educational programs in Singapore,
South Africa and China. In October 2005, TLI co-sponsored the first Sino-U.S.
Global Logistics Forum in Shanghai, China and established a partnership with
Shanghai Jiao Tong University.
"Over the past fifteen years UPS has been TLI's most consistent and generous
financial supporter. UPS funding has been a key factor in the growth of Georgia
Tech's global programs in logistics," said Professor Don Ratliff, Executive
Director of TLI.
Established in 1951 and based in Atlanta, Georgia, The UPS Foundation identifies
specific areas where its backing clearly impacts social issues. In support
of this strategic approach, the UPS Foundation has identified literacy, hunger
relief, and volunteerism as its focus areas.
In 2004, the UPS Foundation distributed nearly $40 million worldwide through
grants that benefit organizations or programs such as the UPS Global Logistics
Program at Georgia Tech and provide support for building stringer communities.
"Giving back to the communities is an important part of UPS's culture that's
embraced by our employees through volunteerism, making donations and sharing
their intellectual capital," said Evern Cooper Epps, president of The UPS Foundation
and vice president of UPS corporate relations. "Together with nonprofit partners
such as TLI, we work to make a positive impact on the lives of people in need."
ATLANTA (March 3, 2006) — Georgia Tech's School of Industrial
and Systems Engineering (ISyE), ranked No. 1 in the country for the past
15 years by U.S. News and World Report, has received a commitment
of $20 million from Georgia Tech alumnus H. Milton Stewart and his wife
Carolyn Stewart.
The commitment establishes a permanent endowment, the income from which
will be available for unrestricted use within ISyE.
The school has been named the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial
and Systems Engineering in recognition of the Stewarts' commitment.
ISyE becomes the fourth named school in the Georgia Tech College of Engineering,
joining the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering, the
Daniel Guggenheim School of Aerospace Engineering and the Wallace H.
Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory
University.
"The opportunities presented by a commitment of this magnitude
are nothing short of amazing," said Chelsea C. "Chip" White
III, the H. Milton and Carolyn J. Stewart School Chair in ISyE. "I
look forward to working with our faculty, staff, and administration in
determining how these funds can best be used to build upon the school's
long tradition of innovation, research and educational excellence, and
academic leadership."
The highly visible U.S. News & World Report college rankings
have placed ISyE in the nation's number one slot in industrial
and manufacturing engineering for 16 of the past 17 years. The Stewart's
commitment will be instrumental in helping the school maintain and increase
its national prominence.
"You can't have the nation's No. 1 ISyE program
for fifteen years running without strong private, philanthropic support
from alumni and friends, corporations, and foundations," said
College of Engineering Dean Don P. Giddens. "Sustaining the unparalleled
quality of the school's research programs and the excellence of
its faculty and student body takes ongoing, significant investment. We
are very fortunate that Milt Stewart has always understood that need
and offered his wholehearted support of ISyE."
In addition to a gift of $2.5 million that has already been made, the
Stewarts' commitment consists of two charitable remainder annuity
trusts totaling $7.5 million that have recently been established and
a third charitable remainder annuity trust of $10 million that will be
established in the near future. The Stewarts will receive income from
the trusts until December 2015, when the trust assets will be transferred
to the endowment, whose estimated value will be at least $20 million.
"We were thrilled seven years ago when they created the first
school chair in Georgia Tech history, a visionary step that helped secure
the finest leadership available for the School," said Georgia Tech
President Wayne Clough. "Now, with this wonderfully generous commitment,
Milt and Carolyn have ensured the ongoing momentum and prestige of the
school they love so much for many years to come."
Stewart has a long history of philanthropy at Georgia Tech. He established
the H. Milton Stewart Endowment Fund for ISyE Programs in 1995 and the
H. Milton and Carolyn J. Stewart School Chair in ISyE in 1999. He has
supported scholarships for women students coming to Georgia Tech from
Habersham High School.
Stewart is retired chairman and CEO of Standard Group Inc., a company
he established in 1987 with his sister, Kay Swanson, in Cornelia, Georgia.
Holdings of the Standard Group at that time included Standard Telephone,
which Stewart's father, H. M. Stewart Sr., purchased in 1939. Arkansas-based
Alltel purchased Standard Telephone in 1998.
In
addition to receiving his bachelor's degree in Industrial Engineering
from Georgia Tech in 1961, Stewart later went on to receive his MBA from
Emory University. Stewart is a trustee emeritus of the Georgia
Tech Foundation, emeritus member and former chairman of the ISyE Advisory
Board, former member of the College of Engineering Advisory Board, and
a former president, trustee, and Executive Committee member of the Georgia
Tech Alumni Association.
For more information:
Megan McRainey
Institute Communications and Public Affairs
Georgia Tech
404-894-6016
megan.mcrainey@icpa.gatech.edu
During the spring and summer of 2005, Dr. C. John Langley Jr. from The Logistics Institute at Georgia Tech, with industry experts from Capgemini, DHL, and SAP, conducted an extensive study about using 3PL services in North America, Western Europe, Asia-Pacific, Latin America, South Africa and Middle East to examine critical trends and issues among key markets and key customers in the 3PL industry. The objectives of this study are:
This latest and past reports can not be found at the study's official site, http://3plstudy.com/.
]]>ATLANTA (April 20, 2006) * Your city has 48 hours to vaccinate every man, woman and child to prevent a dangerous pandemic. Where do you put the clinics, how many health care workers will you need and how do you get 2 million people to a finite number of emergency clinics?
The logistics of handling all those panicked people, health care workers, vaccinations, clinics and forms are dizzying. And while health departments have plans in place, it's very difficult to know how well those plans will perform when time is critical and the minutes needed to move patients to a large clinic or for a frightened patient to fill out a form could mean life or death for thousands or millions of people.
Now researchers at Georgia Tech have developed a computer program, based on a clinical model created by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), to help U.S. state, city and county health care departments create and test more efficient plans for treating infectious illness, whether it's a natural or man-made outbreak.
The program, called RealOpt and created by Dr. Eva Lee, an associate professor of industrial and systems engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology, will be installed over the next few months at health departments across the state of Georgia and health departments in 35 other states have plans to test the program. While the program is still in the testing phase, it will soon be available free to any government health department that requests it from Georgia Tech.
RealOpt has been tested by the DeKalb County Health Department in Georgia, and the county ran a very successful anthrax drill last year. Lee used RealOpt to help DeKalb test and improve its existing bioterror preparedness plan.
RealOpt takes the numerous variables associated with a health care department's treatment of a very large group of people, and through large-scale simulation and optimization (even considering variables such as panic and language barriers), pinpoints the most efficient way to move patients to and through a facility. Using the program, a health care department can determine the best location for emergency clinics based on population density and road accessibility, the most efficient facility layout, the number of health care professionals needed in certain areas, the number of vaccinations needed and the time it will take to treat patients.
RealOpt can be used to prepare for a possible outbreak, as well as for emergency re-assignment of health care workers within the clinic and between clinics during an actual outbreak. By being able to assess preparedness, health departments will have more a precise estimate of the resources and funds needed to treat communities before an actual outbreak.
In addition to its role in planning, one of RealOpt's significant advantages is its ability to process data in real time as the emergency treatment occurs. As patient flows fluctuate, the program can determine how to reallocate the facility's resources in a fraction of a second, sending more doctors or nurses to one station or more attendants to the paperwork processing area.
"Rapid analysis of scenarios not only allows for large-scale planning and preparedness, but also allows on-the-spot optimization to maintain the best resource allocation over time," Lee said. "As patients enter and progress through the clinic we can observe the flow and dynamically adjust the configuration as needed. This is also critical for response to catastrophic events, for example, if one treatment site collapses."
RealOpt also includes an automated facility-layout drawing tool that allows health care workers to design and analyze their own clinic layout in response to various emergency situations, such as anthrax, smallpox, flu pandemic or natural disaster.
Lee continues to add to RealOpt's capabilities, and is currently adding a disease propagation component to the system. The addition would help to analyze the disease's spread within treatment sites and possible ways to halt or minimize the spread. It will also determine how to redirect patients should one center need to be quarantined or closed to prevent further spread of a disease.
]]>On Friday 14 April, we phoned each of UPS, FedEx, and DHL to carry identical packages to our contacts in:
The packages have been picked up and are now en route. You can follow the race and (eventually) see the final results at http://www.warehouse-science.com/
You are invited to join the class Thursday 20 April, 9:30-11am in IC205, when Mark Sobolewski, VP of International Strategy at UPS, will visit ISyE 6202 to discuss issues of international freight and to describe how UPS handled our packages.
]]>Caravans used to ply the world's trade routes, depositing goods, people, social
customs, ideas and religious beliefs along the way.
It took days, weeks or months.
It's much easier now.
"But we were surprised to learn that it's not such a flat world after
all, Thomas Friedman notwithstanding," says John
J. Bartholdi, coordinator of Georgia
Tech's annual Great International Package Delivery Race.
Friedman, a New York Times columnist, has argued that the world is "flat" because
the lowering of trade and political barriers, along with technological advances,
have made it possible to reach billions of people quickly across the globe.
Or, not so flat when you're delivering the goods.
"It can be challenging to get a package to Ouagadougou [pronounced Wah-gah-doo-goo],
Burkina Faso [West Africa]," says Bartholdi of this year's
race, which took place in mid-April. Bartholdi and his students
annually use UPS, FedEx and DHL to send packages containing Georgia Tech souvenirs
such as T-shirts, hats and coffee cups. At the same time, the carriers also
raced from Atlanta to Split, the largest city in the Dalmation region of Croatia;
Surabaya, capital of East Java, Indonesia; and Punta Arenas, capital of the
Patagonian region of Chile and one of the world's southernmost cities. (It
recently snowed there.)
The package race was started "just for fun" four years ago, says Bartholdi,
a professor of supply chain management. "We do it each spring. At that
time I am teaching a graduate program and we have students from all over the
world." UPS, FedEx and DHL each has its own freight network. Each delivery
depends on the construction of the network.
For example, FedEx won the race to Ouagadougou, delivering its package in
five days at a cost of $202.82. The package went from Atlanta to Memphis to
Newark, N.J., to Paris and then to Ouagadougou.
UPS delivered its package in six days at a cost of $202.47. It went from
Atlanta to Hapeville to Louisville, Ky.; Philadelphia; Paris; Abidjan, Ivory
Coast; then to Ouagadougou. The package was delayed in Abidjan because a scheduled
flight was canceled.
DHL delivered its package nine days later at a cost of $165.02. It went from
Atlanta to Wilmington, Ohio; New York; Cologne, Germany; Brussels, Belgium;
Lagos, Nigeria, then to Ouagadougou. The package sat in Ouagadougou for several
days before delivery.
DHL said the address was inadequate, according to Bartholdi.
The results have been pretty consistent over the years, Bartholdi says.
For example, DHL generally is cheaper. "And among the few packages that
we send, one always seems to get missent," he says.
That distinction this year went to FedEx. A package destined for Split took
10 days to deliver, twice as long as the other carriers. A keying error by
the pickup courier was to blame. Instead of inputting HV, the Universal Postal
Union Code for Croatia (known by its people as Hrvatska), the courier apparently
input CR, the code for Costa Rica.
UPS won the race to Split, delivering its package in five days, but only
three minutes ahead of DHL. UPS also won to Surabaya, arriving there in four
days. The others followed a day or two later.
DHL was the victor to Punta Arenas. Its package arrived in four days, instead
of six.
Bartholdi says it's not unreasonable to expect that you can
pretty much get a package delivered anywhere in the world in about a week.
Just make sure the address is sufficient.
"The translation of information from the paper form to the computer resulted
in some of our packages enjoying prolonged travel to unexpected places," says Bartholdi,
chuckling.
Putting international package carriers to the test, logistics professor John Bartholdi and
his colleagues shipped a Georgia Tech T-shirt, hat and coffee cup from the
downtown Atlanta campus to four distant points on the globe. Each of the three
major carriers won at least one race, though prices varied and the margin of
victory was sometimes small -- in one case, three minutes! Snafus included
processing errors, especially keying mistakes, and problems with subcontractors.
Essential Science Indicators contains data on Research Fronts (see Research Front Methodology) which are updated every two months. As part of this bimonthly processing, Special Topics identifies the Research Fronts that are appearing for the first time in each of the 22 major fields covered by Essential Science Indicators. A new Front consists of core papers not previously included in any prior Front. We list here the most prominent of this new crop for each of the 22 fields as determined by the number of core papers they contain and the citations received. For details on the core papers and other statistical characteristics of each Front, see the Research Fronts section of the Essential Science Indicators from Thomson Scientific.
Click here to view the article.
]]>What do ants and workers at Subway have in common?
A method of efficiently coordinating the transfer of food. In the case of
ants, it's moving food to the nest. In the case of Subway workers, it's quickly
delivering custom-made sandwiches to hungry customers.
Both employ bucket
brigades. Workers hand off food one to another, much like firefighters
once did with buckets of water to extinguish a blaze before pumps were invented.
It's an incredibly efficient -- yet simple -- way of moving goods, one that
businesses are adopting to help improve their supply chains and their bottom
lines.
Executives at businesses such as Subway or CVS might never have bored into
anthills for business lessons before they met John
J. Bartholdi III.
Bartholdi is director of Georgia Tech's Logistics
Institute, founded in 1992 to provide cutting-edge research in the field.
The businesses sought out Bartholdi, along with a former
graduate student, Don Eisenstein, for their insight and got a nature lesson
in the process. Though ant-watching may seem quirky, Bartholdi's
and Eisenstein's ideas are based on mathematics and observations of workers
on assembly and distribution lines, as well as the activities of social insects
adept at organizing themselves.
"In an ant colony, there are thousands of workers, but nobody is in
charge," says Bartholdi, who collects ants from around
the world with a hand lens and tweezers, putting them into vials of alcohol. "There's
no management, no consultants, no IT department. And yet they manage to allocate
workers to tasks so that the overall organization supports the survival of
the colony."
Efficient supply chains are important with the growing geographical distances
between production and consumption. "That's why the shirt I'm wearing
was sewn in Pakistan from cotton that was grown in Texas but was purchased
from a Target in Atlanta and at a cheaper cost than a shirt 20 years ago," says Bartholdi,
who returns this week from South Africa, where he lectured on supply chains
at the University of Stellenbosch in Cape Town.
"Georgia Tech is really in the forefront of international education,
particularly in topics like logistics, which is an international activity," says Bartholdi,
who lectured in Panama last month.
Combining that worldview and his penchant for the offbeat, Bartholdi coordinates Georgia
Tech's annual Great International Package Delivery Race. The competition
involves sending packages via DHL, FedEx and UPS to the far corners of the
world to see which firm gets to each destination first -- and to study why
the runners-up do not.
But aside from globalization, businesses want to improve operations for competitive
reasons and to bolster profits. They want to get goods to customers at the
right time, at the right point, in the right condition and at the lowest cost.
Wal-Mart, for example, is testing the use of radio frequency identification
tags in tracking the shipment of perishable items, such as fruit, with the
aim of ensuring that when they are sold in stores, they aren't overripe and
have to be discounted or discarded.
Transportation companies, such as Sandy Springs-based United Parcel Service,
have moved beyond shipping and into the logistics business to boost their revenue
and profits. They now warehouse inventory for customers, fulfill orders and
inspect, repackage and label merchandise.
Last month, for example, Philips Electronics hired UPS to do just that for
customers of its medical systems division in 50 countries. Those customers
can now get critical parts faster -- the same day, as opposed to the next business
day.
Bucket brigades are especially useful in labor-intensive distribution warehouses.
Drugstore giant CVS was among the first to test Bartholdi and
Eisenstein's idea, inspired, in part, by a species of ant, messor barbarus.
The smallest, slowest of these ants forage out farthest, and carry seed back
toward the nest. Larger, faster ants wrest the seed from the smaller ants,
toting it home. The smaller ants return to collect more seed.
"So you have exactly the bucket brigade organization in which the work
is passed from slower to faster workers," says Bartholdi,
who has about 100 ants on display on bookshelves at his home in Morningside.
(A bucket brigade simulation is available at www2.isye.gatech.edu/~jjb/bucket-brigades.html)
CVS used to put the fastest worker in the first position on the line to pick
merchandise to fill orders. That resulted in bottlenecks.
"He was picking faster than anybody downstream," says Bartholdi,
who is the Manhattan Associates professor of supply chain management at Georgia
Tech's School of Industrial and Systems Engineering. The fastest worker would
get stuck behind a slower worker and could only pick at the same speed as the
slower worker.
The solution: Move the fastest worker to the end of the line.
"Under bucket brigades, whenever the fastest worker completes work,
he goes back to get more work," Bartholdi says. "This
triggers a sequence in which each worker gives up work to the faster worker
and walks back to get work from a slower worker. The slowest worker starts
another order. They are at the beginning of the chain."
Workers prefer this because it accounts for differences in ability and differences
in customer orders, according to Bartholdi and Eisenstein,
who now is a professor of operations management at the University of Chicago.
"When workers were assigned to a fixed zone in the line, they felt isolated
and under pressure," Bartholdi says. "Working in
bucket brigades, they felt like a team. And the punchline of this story is
that CVS measured a 34 percent increase in productivity, and this cost them
nothing to implement."
Subway's challenge was to keep everybody busy on the line assembling sandwiches
that are all different and therefore require varying amounts of work. "The
most visible problem is you have the cashier at the end available, but all
of the waiting customers are at the start of the assembly line," Bartholdi says.
Subway tried having the last worker circle back around to the start. But
this required space to pass. And it guaranteed that no one could move faster
than the slowest worker.
"Bucket brigades turn out to be a very natural solution because it divides
the work not based on average task times -- which are meaningless because different
sandwiches are being assembled -- but on how long it actually took to spread
the mayonnaise on that last sandwich," Bartholdi says.
So the person putting on the mayonnaise for one sandwich may not necessarily
be the one putting on the mayonnaise for the next sandwich.
"A bucket brigade is dynamic," says Craig Tovey, professor of industrial
and systems engineering and computer science at Georgia Tech and a colleague
of Bartholdi's. "It is constantly adjusting itself to
the work at hand."
Bartholdi, 59, is dynamic as well, constantly on the prowl
for ideas to solve problems.
"Like any academic, I have many things that I find fascinating that
I'm working on that nobody else does, at least for a while," says Bartholdi,
a Navy veteran who spent two tours of duty in and around Vietnam. "It
takes some time for these ideas to reach maturity."
For example, Bartholdi and a former colleague, Loren Platzman,
used mathematical objects of curiosity -- spacefilling curves -- to devise
more efficient routes for Fulton County's Meals on Wheels program, which delivers
hundreds of meals daily to shut-ins.
"We estimated it shortened the routes by at least 13 percent, which
meant they needed one fewer vehicle," Bartholdi says.
Bartholdi wants to figure out how cost savings can be shared
equitably along all of the nodes of a supply chain. Otherwise businesses might
not have an immediate incentive to collaborate to make improvements, figuring
the benefits might be realized downstream in a different company.
"Those methods typically have to satisfy some notions of fairness and
transparency," Bartholdi says. "And they must be
resistant to manipulation. They must be practical."
Is there something in nature that can provide answers?
"I hadn't thought of that before," says Bartholdi. "Wow!"
THE BARTHOLDI FILE
• Born: January 1947, San Diego
• Education: Bachelor's, master's in math, Ph.D. in industrial and
systems engineering, University of Florida.
• Family: Wife, Marian Burge, deputy director, Atlanta Legal Aid Society;
son, Gabriel, 18, student, French Culinary Institute, New York.
• Collects: Photos of badly designed elevator panels. One of the worst
is in the South parking deck at Piedmont Hospital, with each floor associated
with no fewer than four separate buttons.
• Also collects ants. "The era of big-game hunting is long gone.
But collecting ants also has its element of danger. Some ants bite, some ants
sting, and some do both. So you pick them up with tweezers, being careful not
to crush them." A favorite is the leafcutter ant, found in his backyard. "They
harvest growing vegetation, bring it back to their nests, chew it up and then
regurgitate it as a substrate on which to grow fungus. The fungus is the food
that nourishes the colony."
• In his office: Magic tricks and puzzles.
• What most people don't know: As a young adult, he studied ballet and
tap dance.
Norcross, Georgia: Milton Stewart was honored as one of five recipients of the Presidents Award by the Institute of Industrial Engineers. The Presidents Award, new for 2006, is bestowed on those who have made significant commitments to leading industrial engineering programs that have resulted in named industrial engineering departments. These significant contributions enhance the profession as well as heighten awareness and improve public understanding of the value of industrial engineering to contemporary society.
Stewart's has made a lifelong commitment to his alma mater Georgia Tech, supporting many programs and establishing the H. Milton Stewart Endowment Fund for ISyE Programs (Industrial and Systems Engineering). The school named the department in his honor.
Stewart is retired chairman and CEO of Standard Group Inc and has served on various advisory boards and councils. Stewart also has an MBA from Emory University. Stewart is the retired chairman and CEO of Standard Group, Inc, in Cornelia, Georgia.
]]>Norcross (Metro Atlanta), Georgia. Evren Ozkaya, Ph.D. candidate in the Georgia
Institute of Technology, School of Industrial and Systems Engineering has been
awarded the John L. Imhoff Scholarship for his excellence in academic and professional
achievement and dedication to the industrial engineering profession by the
Institute of Industrial Engineers. Ozkaya is the first recipient of this distinguished
scholarship.
Evren stands out among the crowd of research and professorial assistants in
that he can see the global application of process improvement. His research
and contributions span Asia, the United States and Europe. He has worked on
cost reduction, supply chain management, logistics and RFID (Radio Frequency
ID) programs in all three countries, excelling in each area. Evren combines
community work with organizations such as UNICEF, practical research inside
major corporations with teaching. He organized international seminars, a case
study tournament, and a career project for the "European Students of Industrial
Engineering and Management" association comprised of 66 universities in 22
countries as a means of promoting the profession.
He is currently a Teaching Assistant of "Supply Chain Modeling:
Manufacturing and Warehousing" class at Georgia Tech. His references for this
award pointed out Evren's dedication, motivation and initiative, stating his "leadership
and organizational skills are remarkably fine tuned." He was referred to as
an "ambassador for expanding the impact of industrial engineers worldwide".
Evren holds his undergraduate degree from Bilkent University in Turkey where
he placed 54th among 1.5 million students. He completed his Masters at Georgia
Tech and is in process of completing his Ph.D.
program at Georgia Tech. IIE is proud that Evren was nominated and selected
for this award because he exemplifies the qualities that the late John L. Imhoff
desired to honor with this scholarship.
IIE is the world's largest professional society dedicated solely to the support
of the industrial engineering profession and other individuals involved with
improving quality, processes and productivity in all industry segments. Founded
in 1948, IIE is an international, non-profit association that provides leadership
for the application, education, training, research, and development of industrial
engineering processes and tools. www.iienet.org.
IIE also has a student chapter at Georgia Tech.
The Breast Cancer 3-Day in Atlanta will start on Friday morning, October 20th and end with Closing Ceremonies on Sunday afternoon, October 22nd. Thousands of walkers will cover about 20 miles a day, traveling at their own pace. The walkers will be supported by hundreds of volunteer crew members who will provide meals, water and snack stops, gear transport, hot showers, portable restrooms, safety on the streets, and comprehensive medical services.
In order to participate, each walker must train for the event and must commit to raising a minimum of $2,200 (many walkers will raise more than the minimum). To help prepare for the Breast Cancer 3-Day, each walker is supported by coaches who assist in all aspects of training and fundraising. Clinics, meetings, training sessions, and mailings provide ongoing support.
All Georgia Tech faculty, staff, students, and alumni are encouraged to either join Team Buzzz or form their own team. Please contact Ramel at nadya.ramel@isye.gatech.edu, or 404.894-2321 for more information about Team Buzzz.
Those wishing to help Ramel reach her goal can make a donation directly to her donation page online at www.The3Day.org/Atlanta06/nadyaz. To learn more about the Breast Cancer 3-Day, or to serve as a volunteer, visit www.The3Day.org or call (800) 996-3DAY.
]]>ALEXANDRIA, VA- The American Statistical Association (ASA) today announced the election of 60 of its members as Fellows of the Association, in recognition of outstanding professional contribution to and leadership in the field of statistical science. [Among the elected members is Paul Kvam, Professor of Statistics in the School of Industrial and Systems Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology.] The designation of Fellow has been a superlative honor in the society for over nine decades. The Fellows will be presented at a ceremony at the Association's 166th annual Joint Statistical Meetings, taking place August 6-10, 2006, in Seattle.
According to ASA By-Laws, each year, the Committee on Fellows can only elect one-third of one percent of the total ASA membership. In order to be honored with the title of Fellow, members must have an established reputation and have made outstanding contributions in some aspect of statistical work. "Becoming an ASA Fellow is one of the highest honors in our profession," said Sallie Keller-McNulty, President of the ASA. "This year's set of new ASA Fellows represent a superb cross section of our members who have strengthened the statistical sciences discipline through their outstanding achievements in education and research, and through their unselfish commitments to the service of our profession."
Attached is a list of this year's honorees, including their names and affiliations [see http://www.amstat.org/pressroom/index.cfm?fuseaction=2006fellows for the complete list]. The Committee on Fellows evaluates candidates' contributions to the advancements of statistics, giving due weight to publications, the positions held by the candidates in the organizations in which they are employed, activities within the Association, membership and attainments in other societies, and other professional activities. The case for each candidate is judged individually, with no one of these criteria govern selection to the exclusion of the others. Selection committee members were Elizabeth M. Halloran, Demissie Alemayehu, Robert M. Bell, Donald Guthrie, Roderick J. Little, Bonnie K. Ray, Nozer D. Singpurwalla, Robert T. Smythe, and Grace L. Yang.
For additional information, please contact the American Statistical Association at (703) 684-1221, or visit the ASA Web site at www.amstat.org. To receive a press release, including official citation, on a specific Fellow, contact Jeanene Harris at the ASA.
Thanks to the ASA for this article. Copyright * 2006 American Statistical Association.
]]>A California medical software company has launched the first "inverse planning" system for helping cancer treatment specialists optimize the placement of radioactive seeds used in the brachytherapy process. Optimization improves the treatment by helping meet physician-set constraints for consistent radiation doses to tumor cells * while minimizing effects on nearby structures.
Used for treating prostate cancer and other forms of the disease, the new system is based on complex numerical optimization algorithms licensed from the Georgia Institute of Technology. Beyond improving the overall treatment, the new system dramatically reduces the time required for planning the seed placement.
The Panther* Brachy InversePlan system, announced by Prowess, Inc. at the annual meeting of the American Society for Therapeutic Radiology and Oncology, improves local tumor control by more consistently focusing radiation while reducing the number of radioactive seeds and needles used. Because the treatment planning can now be done in less than a minute * compared to hours with older systems * planning can be done just prior to seed implantation. That eliminates an extra clinical visit and ensures that the plan is based on the dimensions of the tumor and organ at the time of implantation.
"From the clinical side, this is a significant advance in being able to treat prostate cancer with fewer side effects while providing better local tumor control," said Eva Lee, a mathematician and associate professor in Georgia Tech's School of Industrial and Systems Engineering. "From the clinician's point of view, this will allow physicians to prescribe how they want the radiation to be applied, and the system will produce an optimized plan to do that. The system will produce a better outcome, reduce the amount of time required to design the plan, and allow patients to recover more quickly."
The optimization algorithms developed by Lee and colleague Marco Zaider at the Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York account for numerous factors, including the dose provided by each radioactive seed, shape of the organ being treated, location of tumor cells within the organ, location of critical structures for which radiation dose should be limited, sensitivity of tissues to radiation, and expected shrinkage of the organ after treatment. The goals are to provide consistent tumor-killing radiation doses to the tumor cells while limiting potentially damaging doses to nearby critical structures, such as the urethra, bladder and rectum.
Earlier computer-aided techniques for determining the best locations to place the seeds required many hours of planning, and could not optimize for specific doses specified by physicians. Because so much time was required to plan the treatment, patients had to make two clinic visits * one to obtain information for planning the treatment and a second to actually implant the seeds. Because the size and shape of the prostate can change over time, the time between planning and implantation allowed the creation of potential inaccuracies that could reduce the tumor control and cause side effects.
"This system can be used in real time," said Lee. "The patient can come in, the imaging is done, and we can then do the planning and implantation right away. There is no delay between the imaging, planning and implantation of the seeds."
Because the system can quickly re-optimize the placement plan, changes can be made quickly while the patient is on the operating table to account for difficulties in placing seeds, Lee noted.
John Nguyen, president of Prowess, said the new system gives physicians better control over radiation doses while reducing the time required to treat each patient.
"Physicians can now really impose clinical criteria within the planning process," he said. "Further, the system is extraordinarily fast, requiring only seconds to design an optimal plan. Having a system so fast means physicians can dynamically adjust and re-optimize the treatment plans as they insert needles. This was impossible to do before."
The new software should help clinics provide more consistent cancer treatment that does not depend solely on the skills of the treating physicians.
"Right now, the planning varies from physician to physician even though the end goal is the same," he noted. "Using this system, they can test out different options, varying the dose constraints to see in minutes if they can come up with a better plan. Such a system will help standardize treatment."
Prowess will add the new algorithms to treatment planning systems it already has in operation at more than 700 clinics in the United States.
The patented system is based on optimization techniques known as mixed integer programming. It was licensed to Prowess in 2004 and converted to a commercial product after clinical trials of more than 100 patients demonstrated its effectiveness at improving treatment plans. The system runs on high-end personal computers.
Beyond prostate cancer therapy, the mixed-integer algorithms can also be used to optimize radioactive seed and external beam radiation treatment for a broad range of other cancers. With support from the National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health and Whitaker Foundation, Lee has also been working with specialists on improving treatments for breast, lung, cervical, brain and liver cancers.
"Once the optimization has been determined, we can use this in many different applications and it works very well for improving local tumor control," she said. "I feel really good about seeing this applied in the clinic to improve treatment to patients."
Research News & Publications Office
Georgia Institute of Technology
75 Fifth Street, N.W., Suite 100
Atlanta, Georgia 30308
Media Relations Contacts: John Toon (404-894-6986); E-mail: (jtoon@gatech.edu) or Jane Sanders (404-894-2214); E-mail: (jsanders@gatech.edu).
Technical Contact: Eva Lee (404-894-4962); E-mail: (eva.lee@isye.gatech.edu).
Writer: John Toon
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