2016 INFORMS Annual Meeting Program

WB49

INFORMS Nashville – 2016

WB49

4 - Automating The Scheduling Of A Softball League Kent J Kostuk, Federated Co-Operatives Limited, kent.kostuk@usask.ca, Keith Willoughby

211-MCC Panel: Publishing in INFORMS Transactions on Education Sponsored: Education (INFORMED) Sponsored Session Moderator: Jeroen Belien, KU Leuven, Brussel, Belgium, jeroen.belien@kuleuven.be 1 - Informs Transactions On Education (ITE): A General Overview Jeroen Belien, KU Leuven, jeroen.belien@kuleuven.be The panelists include ITE editors and authors who have published recently in ITE. The authors will discuss their experiences with submitting articles to ITE. The editors will provide suggestions to authors who wish to submit their work to ITE—in particular, articles about case studies and about educational games. 2 - Publishing Classroom Games In Ite Stefan Creemers, IESEG School of Management Lille, s.creemers@ieseg.fr 3 - Ite Author Experiences Vera Tilson, University of Rochester, vera.tilson@Simon.Rochester.edu 4 - Informs Transactions On Education Author Experiences Maureen Lojo, California State University, lojom@skymail.csus.edu Sponsored: SpORts Sponsored Session Chair: Sean Barnes, Univ of Maryland-College Park, Robert H. Smith School of Business, College Park, MD, 20742, United States, sbarnes@rhsmith.umd.edu Co-Chair: Margret Bjarnadottir, University of Maryland, College Park, College Park, MD, 2, United States, margret@rhsmith.umd.edu 1 - A Predictive Modeling And Robust Optimization Framework For Prioritizing Major League Baseball Free Agent Acquisitions Margrét Bjarnadóttir, Univ of Maryland-College Park, College Park, MD, United States, margret@rhsmith.umd.edu, Sean Barnes, Aurelie Thiele Major League Baseball teams are tasked with constructing rosters of players that can compete successfully against other teams. This process involves making decisions about which players to acquire via free agency. We propose a predictive modeling and robust optimization framework for supporting these free agent acquisition decisions. Specifically, we develop predictive models for expected player performance, and optimize free agent acquisitions (robustly) for a given budget. We demonstrate the effectiveness of this approach across several scenarios of budget levels and free agent markets. 2 - An Optimization-based Approach For The National Football League Tiebreaking Procedure Matias Siebert, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA, United States, msiebert6@gatech.edu, George L Nemhauser, Joel Sokol When the NFL regular season is in its final weeks, teams, fans and media want to know which teams have clinched a place in the playoffs, which one are eliminated and which teams still have the chance to make the playoffs. Given the number of possible scenarios and the intricacies of the tiebreaking procedures, simple enumeration approaches to solve this problem become highly inefficient in practice. We propose an optimization-based approach to determine the current situation and the possibilities for each team to make the playoffs. 3 - Sporting: A Large Applied Research Project In Sport Scheduling Tomas Nordlander, SINTEF ICT, Trondheim, Norway, Tomas.Nordlander@sintef.no Sports leagues and tournaments are scheduled daily around the world. Although the underlying problem is a hard mathematical problem, most end-users resort to manual scheduling. In 2005, SINTEF’s optimisation developed CupCom for Profixio AS. This is an optimisation engine for tournament scheduling, which last year scheduled around 150,000 matches of handball, football and volleyball in Norway and Sweden. We have also been helping the Norwegian Football Federation with scheduling their top professional leagues for several years. I will talk about this and our new large research-based innovation project together with PROFIXIO AS. WB50 212-MCC SpORts: Sports Analytics IV

A local minor softball league was finding it difficult to manually develop and publish league schedules in the short time window available between when teams were formed and when a published schedule was required. Early prototypes were developed to demonstrate proof of concept as prior attempts to automate had not been successful. A complete solution was developed allowing the league to produce and publish league schedules with significantly less work and eliminating the need to transcribe manually generated schedules into electronic documents.

WB51

213-MCC Education I Contributed Session

Chair: Jay Parsons, Associate Professor, University of Nebraska - Lincoln, 103B Filley Hall, P.O. Box 830922, Lincoln, NE, 68583-0922, United States, jparsons4@unl.edu 1 - A Holistic Conceptual Framework For Assessing The Effectiveness And Viability Of an Academic Program munir majdalawieh, Associate Professor, zayed university, Mirdif, Dubai, 19282, United Arab Emirates, munir@themajd.com Many aspects of the accreditation process focus on the past and the present (prove), the “program review” assessment is “forward-looking assessment” (improve) and thus transforms the process into a continuing assessment activity rather than a periodic event. The aim of this paper is to propose a conceptual framework for “program review” to assess the effectiveness and viability of an academic program and to improve the academic program and the education of the students. The proposed framework and the program review measurement matrix will provide an opportunity to colleges and universities to undertake a robust and targeted approach to proactively and continuously review their academic programs. 2 - Experience With A New Online Game To Teach Sourcing In A Supply Chain Management Course Samuel C Wood, President, Responsive Learning Techologies, 4546 El Camino Real, #243, Los Altos, CA, 94022, United States, wood@responsive.net, Mozart Batista de Castro Menezes The Gleacher Sourcing game is a new online competitive simulation from the developers of Littlefield Technologies and the Supply Chain Game. In the game, students compete and collaborate in ad hoc supply chains to maximize cash position or earnings. After an overview of the game this paper will discuss the use of the game in a Masters level Supply Chain Management course. In a 2-hour game, students managed the interplay between double marginalization, sourcing agreements, pricing, and working capital management. 3 - A Closer Look At Underrepresented Women In Engineering: A Classroom Study Exploring The Effects Of Anonymity On Student Peer Reviewers Jacqueline Ng, PhD Candidate, Northwestern University, 2145 Sheridan Road, C-230, Evanston, IL, 60208, United States, jacqueline.ng@northwestern.edu, Bruce Ankenman, Seyed Iravani The underrepresentation of women in STEM is a complex problem with few answers. We conduct a classroom study investigating the effects of anonymity on the critical nature of peer feedback. Using NLP and machine learning, we find that women are more sensitive than men to anonymity. Specifically, anonymous women provide more negative feedback than non-anonymous women, but less constructive feedback. Moreover, the negative sentiment is directed mainly at their male peers. In contrast, we do not find such dissimilarities between anonymous and non-anonymous men. This study suggests that STEM women may benefit from greater opportunities to support and mentor each other, outside of the classroom. 4 - Simple Tools To Help Agricultural Decision Makers Think About Risk Jay Parsons, Associate Professor, University of Nebraska - Lincoln, 103B Filley Hall, P.O. Box 830922, Lincoln, NE, 68583-0922, United States, jparsons4@unl.edu, Jim Jansen The focus of this talk will be on experiences in developing and using simple tools to help agricultural producers think about and manage risk. Using a simulation scenario and a Risk Scenario Planning tool, we focused on helping producers to think about managing market risk from the standpoint of controlling the distribution of possible outcomes. Marketing alternatives and risk have been difficult topics to education common producers about in the past and continue to be so. However, our approach has shown significant growth in audience commitment to action in managing market risk better in the future.

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