Kabir Katata (supervised by Dr Nalan Gulpinar) passed the viva subject to minor corrections based on a dissertation on the topic "New Risk Management Tools, Hedging and Arbitrage Strategies in Financial, Oil and Gas Markets".

Congratulations!

Dr Tapabrata RAY of the School of Engineering & Information Technology, University of New South Wales, Australia, is visiting us from 01 December 2011 to 02 February 2012.

He is a Senior Lecturer at the University of New South Wales at Australian Defence Force Academy, Canberra. He leads the Multidisciplinary Design Optimization Group. For more information, see his official profile and his personal webpage.

WBS Professor Victor Podinovski has been awarded a European Union grant for a research project "Integrated Econometric and Mathematical programming models into an amendable policy and market analysis tool using FADN database".

The €236,000 (£205,000) grant is a part of the collaborative project 265616 funded by the EU under the Seventh Framework Programme (FP7). There are 11 other European partner universities collaborating on this grant which in total is worth more than €3 million. The project started in April 2011 and will continue for three years until the end of March 2014.

Victor explained, "The aim of the project is to develop operational research and econometric methodologies for the assessment of efficiency of European agricultural farms and tools for simulating implications of policy decisions in the EU agricultural sector. The Warwick contribution to this collaborative project is in the form of performance assessment models and techniques that belong to the area of operational research known as data envelopment analysis (DEA)."

He continued, "Warwick Business School has gained a strong international reputation as a leading school in this area and the fit of the current EU project with our existing expertise is almost perfect. Several Warwick academics are involved in the project, including our new Research Associate Iryna Deineko."

The principal source of data for the project is the vast EU Farm Accountancy Database (FADN) that contains thousands of characteristics and parameters collected over many years at individual farm level for all EU countries.

In the first phase of the project, the WBS team will be employing novel sophisticated models developed at Warwick to identify various patterns characterising potential response of farms to policy changes. In the second phase they will be looking at the integration of the Warwick techniques with the approaches of the other partners in order to develop a unified tool useful for EU policy analysts.

Simon Contreras, Senior Analyst at EMEA, presents work of his Business Analysis group for Procter & Gamble in different areas including:

- Business Intelligence Alerts (as provided by analytic embedded capabilities)

- Real Time Information (how to deliver the right info, to right people, in the fastest possible time)

- Share Reporting (how to precisely project market shares amongst consumers -w/o retailer's data)

- Shopper Purchase Behaviour (how to drive consumer insights based on their shopping cart -w/o retailers data)

- Improve Data Visualization (compelling & effective graphics to convey info., scenarios & reality)

The event takes place on 23 November 2011, 11am in room C0.10 at WBS.
Email ORMS@wbs.ac.uk to reserve your place

A new methodology was developed by Dr Arne Strauss that allows to significantly reduce the runtime of LH Systems’ optimisation module without losing revenue performance on average. As the optimisation process is the most time-consuming module and requires large computer clusters for major firms, there are substantial savings in time or required IT. It is generalizable to many other companies that use RM such as railway operations, for example. A publication co-authored with Philipp Kemmer and Thomas Winter (both LH Systems) is forthcoming in the Journal of the Operational Research Society.

Download the article here.