We congratulate Temenuzhka Panayotova, MSc Business Analytics 2014-15 at WBS, on winning the Operational Research Society's May Hicks award for the best industry-based student project in Operational Research. The award comes with a £1,000 cheque.

In her dissertation project (supervised by Dr Arne Strauss), Temenuzhka used data mining techniques to help UniCredit Bulbank to identify the next best product to offer clients. Two marketing campaigns were run based on her work that resulted in much higher than usual conversion rates. Her work also received the SAS Dissertation Prize 2015 for the best dissertation in her cohort, and a summary of the dissertation was published in the OR Society's IMPACT Magazine (Spring 2016). Read the full story here.

A number of faculty members of the ORMS Group have been invited to contribute to the scientific programme of the conference. Professor Bo Chen has put together four invited sessions, with two sessions on “Innovating Mathematics for New Industrial Challenges” and the other two on “Theoretical Challenges in OR Research”. There are a total of 15 invited speakers from University of Warwick, Cranfield University, London School of Economics and Political Science, University of Central Lancashire, ETH Zurich, and CWI Amsterdam.

Dr Arne Strauss organises an invited session titled “Last Mile Deliveries” with speakers from RWTH Aachen (Germany), Erasmus University Rotterdam (Netherlands), Bundeswehr University Munich (Germany) and the University of Essex (UK).

Dr Vinh Doan will give an invited talk, “Low-rank Matrix Recovery with Ky Fan 2-k-Norm” in a session titled “Conic Optimization and Applications in OR”. Dr Vladimir Deineko is considering an invitation to give a talk in an invited session.

ORMS group member Dr Arne Strauss has been selected in a highly competitive process for membership in the newly created Research Panel of the Operational Research Society.

The stated goal of the Research Panel is to improve the health of OR research in the UK. This will cover monitoring and building the research people pipeline; securing stronger engagement with research funders, including the research councils; enabling more successful applications for research funding and the encouragement of research collaboration both within academe and with end users.

The Academic Director of our MSc Business Analytics, Dr Arne Strauss, has been named to the Analytics Curriculum Advisory Group of the AACSB, the prestigious accrediting body of business schools worldwide. The new advisory group is tasked with providing guidance in developing services to help accelerate the creation and enhance the quality of analytics degree programs in business schools. Dr Strauss will contribute to the upcoming AACSB Data Analytics Seminar in Amsterdam in April 2016.

Dr Arne Strauss is Associate Professor of Operational Research at Warwick Business School. In his role as Academic Director of the MSc Business Analytics program since 2011, he redesigned the curriculum and formed new strategic partnerships with IBM and SAS that include involvement of both companies in course delivery. He serves as external examiner of the MSc Business Analytics program at Imperial College London. Jointly with two colleagues from Computer Science and Social Sciences at the University of Warwick, he recently won a highly competitive IBM Faculty Award of $20,000 to develop an interdisciplinary workshop on the ethics of big data and challenges of data linkage.

AACSB International—The Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business is a global, nonprofit membership organization of educational institutions, businesses, and other entities devoted to the advancement of management education. Established in 1916, AACSB International provides its members with a variety of products and services to assist them with the continuous improvement of their business programs and schools.

A funding bid to the European Commission's Horizon 2020 was successful: starting from March 2016, a team led by Dr Arne Strauss in the ORMS Group at WBS will work together with two other teams based in Germany and Serbia, respectively, to develop coordinated capacity ordering and trajectory pricing for Air Traffic Management.

The team at Warwick will focus on the development of the underpinning mathematical models, control policies and their evaluation. A Research Fellow position at postdoctoral level will support the team over a period of two years; please find the job advert here.

Call: H2020-SESAR-2015-1
Funding volume: 534,158 Euros (220,656 Euros for Warwick)