{"62988":{"#nid":"62988","#data":{"type":"news","title":"Bo Zhang Wins Prestigious George Nicholson Student Paper Competition and Performance Student Paper Award","body":[{"value":"\u003Cp\u003EWithin the span of one week in November, Bo Zhang, a\nPhD student in the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems\nEngineering (ISyE), received both the George Nicholson Student Paper award at\nthe INFORMS annual meeting and the Best Student Paper award at the 28th\nInternational Symposium on Computer Performance, Modeling, Measurements and\nEvaluation (Performance) 2010 conference.\u003C\/p\u003E\n\n\u003Cp\u003EThe George Nicholson Student Paper Competition,\narguably the most prestigious student award in the operations research\ncommunity, is held each year to honor outstanding student papers in the field\nof operations research and the management sciences. \u003C\/p\u003E\n\n\u003Cp\u003EZhang received the Nicholson Award for his paper, \u201cRefined\nSquare-Root Staffing for Call Centers with Impatient Customers,\u201d which he\nco-authored with Johan van Leeuwaarden and Bert Zwart, ISyE adjunct associate\nprofessor and Zhang\u2019s thesis advisor. \u003C\/p\u003E\n\n\u003Cp\u003EIn\nthe paper, Zhang studied how to solve for the minimum staffing level subject to\ndifferent service-level constraints for call centers with impatient customers. The\nauthors developed an approximate solution procedure, which they named\n\u0022refined square-root staffing,\u201d and then demonstrated that this approach\npreserves the insightfulness and computational scalability of the celebrated\nsquare-root staffing principle and yet is provably more accurate. \u003C\/p\u003E\n\n\n\n\u003Cp\u003EAbout\nthe paper, Zwart said that it is a \u201cwell-written, solid theoretical basis that\nprovides relevant practical insights for the most popular model out there for\ncall centers.\u201d\u003C\/p\u003E\n\n\n\n\u003Cp\u003EZhang\nwrote the paper while a guest at Bell Labs, but also worked with Sem Borst and Martin Reiman at Alcatel-Lucent and Josh Reed (PhD IE 2007) at NYU.\nReed also received the Nicholson Award while a student at Georgia Tech.\u003C\/p\u003E\n\n\n\n\u003Cp\u003EIn addition to the Nicholson Award,\nZhang also received the Performance Best Student Paper award for his paper\n\u201cOptimal Server Scheduling in Hybrid P2P Networks,\u201d which he co-authored with\nBorst and Reiman. \u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cp\u003EIn this paper, the authors studied how to manage server capacity in hybrid\npeer-to-peer networks, an increasingly popular type of Internet content\ndistribution paradigm in which each user plays a dual client-server role. According\nto Zhang, \u201cwe find that the structure of optimal server scheduling policies in\nsuch systems depends intricately upon the altruism level of users (i.e., users\u0027\nwillingness to stay in the system and continue helping others after their\ndownload completion). \u003C\/p\u003E\n\n\u003Cp\u003EAbout\nthis recent accomplishment, Zhang said that \u201ca lot of credit should go to the\nfour coauthors of the two papers, who are also great mentors, especially my\nthesis advisor, Bert Zwart.\u201d \u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cp\u003EZwart and Zhang\u2019s co-advisor Hayriye Ayhan, ISyE professor, are proud of Zhang,\nnoting that he is exceptional in that he has broad research interests and is\nable to work on diverse research projects simultaneously. In addition to his\nwork with Zwart and Ayhan, Zhang has collaborated with top researchers in and\nout of the country, which, according to Ayhan, is very unusual for a PhD\nstudent. With Ayhan, Zhang has been\ndeveloping optimal admission control policies in two-stage loss networks. \u201cTo\nthe best of our knowledge,\u201d states Ayhan, Zhang\u2019s \u201cwork is the first one that\ncompletely characterizes the optimal admission policies in this setting.\u201d\u003C\/p\u003E\n\n\u003Cp\u003ETo read Zhang\u2019s research papers,\nvisit his webpage at \u003Ca href=\u0022http:\/\/www2.isye.gatech.edu\/%7Ebzhang34\/\u0022\u003Ehttp:\/\/www2.isye.gatech.edu\/~bzhang34\/\u003C\/a\u003E.\u003C\/p\u003E","summary":null,"format":"limited_html"}],"field_subtitle":"","field_summary":[{"value":"\u003Cp\u003EWithin the span of one week in November, Bo Zhang, a\nPhD student in the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems\nEngineering, received both the George Nicholson Student Paper award at\nthe INFORMS annual meeting and the Best Student Paper award at the 28th\nInternational Symposium on Computer Performance, Modeling, Measurements and\nEvaluation (Performance) 2010 conference.\u003C\/p\u003E","format":"limited_html"}],"field_summary_sentence":[{"value":"Bo Zhang Wins Prestigious George Nicholson Student Paper Competition and Performance Student Paper Award"}],"uid":"27328","created_gmt":"2010-11-30 13:02:57","changed_gmt":"2016-10-08 03:07:50","author":"Edie Cohen","boilerplate_text":"","field_publication":"","field_article_url":"","dateline":{"date":"2010-11-30T00:00:00-05:00","iso_date":"2010-11-30T00:00:00-05:00","tz":"America\/New_York"},"extras":[],"hg_media":{"63033":{"id":"63033","type":"image","title":"Bo Zhang","body":null,"created":"1449176409","gmt_created":"2015-12-03 21:00:09","changed":"1475894552","gmt_changed":"2016-10-08 02:42:32","alt":"Bo Zhang","file":{"fid":"191708","name":"BoPicResize.JPG","image_path":"\/sites\/default\/files\/images\/BoPicResize_0.JPG","image_full_path":"http:\/\/www.tlwarc.hg.gatech.edu\/\/sites\/default\/files\/images\/BoPicResize_0.JPG","mime":"image\/jpeg","size":22684,"path_740":"http:\/\/www.tlwarc.hg.gatech.edu\/sites\/default\/files\/styles\/740xx_scale\/public\/images\/BoPicResize_0.JPG?itok=y8CUbo_l"}}},"media_ids":["63033"],"groups":[{"id":"1242","name":"School of Industrial and Systems Engineering (ISYE)"}],"categories":[{"id":"134","name":"Student and Faculty"}],"keywords":[{"id":"11361","name":"Bo Zhang"},{"id":"109","name":"Georgia Tech"},{"id":"11362","name":"Georgie Nicholson Student Paper Competition"},{"id":"426","name":"isye"}],"core_research_areas":[],"news_room_topics":[],"event_categories":[],"invited_audience":[],"affiliations":[],"classification":[],"areas_of_expertise":[],"news_and_recent_appearances":[],"phone":[],"contact":[{"value":"\u003Cp\u003E\u003Ca href=\u0022mailto:barbara.christopher@isye.gatech.edu\u0022\u003E\u003Cstrong\u003EBarbara \nChristopher\u003C\/strong\u003E\u003C\/a\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EIndustrial and Systems Engineering\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cstrong\u003E404.385.3102\u003C\/strong\u003E\u003C\/p\u003E","format":"limited_html"}],"email":[],"slides":[],"orientation":[],"userdata":""}}}