Relaying the following message from EURO

Following the EURO 2018 Women in Science and EURO 2019 Women in OR sessions, interested members of the OR community are working with the EURO Executive Committee on an initiative to create the EURO WISDOM Forum (Women In Society: Doing Operational Research and Management Science).

This initiative restates the need for gender main-streaming and affirms that OR/MS can offer exciting opportunities for all women if they have equal access to resources and adequate training. Gender main-streaming aims to integrate a gender dimension into existing institutions and practices in order to achieve meaningful gender equality.

WISDOM is a forum to support, empower, and encourage the participation of all genders in OR/MS within EURO. In particular, it aims to promote inclusivity by the following actions:1. Advise/make recommendations/highlight best practices to the EURO executive on issues facing women in OR. Such guidelines can be disseminated to EURO member societies and Working Groups. Positive progress, outcomes and activities of member societies can serve as a template for other member societies;2. Promote championing, networking and mentoring, particularly of women at the early stages of their career in OR;3. Promote a conversation around how OR can be utilised to help create a diverse and inclusive future.

In January 2020, all EURO member societies were invited to nominate one or two members to participate in establishing the EURO WISDOM Forum. At the moment, the WISDOM Forum organising committee (OC) includes 21 members from 10 European OR societies including two EURO representatives, the EURO Vice Presidents Julia Bennell and Claudia Archetti. The chair of the WISDOM OC is Paula Carroll and the Secretary is Annunziata Esposito Amideo, both from the University College Dublin, Ireland.

The WISDOM Forum will operate through three subcommittees focusing on Research, Events and Public Relations (PR). The subcommittees chairs are: Research : Paula Carroll, Events :
Renata Mansini (University of Brescia ,Italy), and PR: Tatiana Tchemisova (University of Aveiro, Portugal).

Our first event is a webinar on “Bias/Fairness and Artificial Intelligence”. You can register for the webinar and subscribe to WISDOM Forum updates by emailing WISDOM@euro-online.org.
Webinar Format* Expert panellists explains data bias in their respective disciplines and application areas (~10/15 minutes each);* Roundtable discussion with audience participation (~15 minutes).
Panellists

Prof Alan Smeaton is Professor of Computing at Dublin City University, Ireland and a Founding Director of the Insight Centre for Data Analytics at DCU. He will speak on Data bias in automatic image and video captioning and its impact. For more information about Alan see https://www.computing.dcu.ie/~asmeaton/

Dr Claire Gormley is an Associate Professor in the School of Mathematics and Statistics in University College Dublin, Ireland and a Funded Investigator in the Insight Centre for Data Analytics and the VistaMilk research centre. Her research develops novel statistical methods for the analysis of complex data arising from substantive problems. The methods solve applied problems across a range of disciplines, including epigenetics, metabolomics, genomics, social science, sports science and political science. She will speak on Be fair to the models: the importance of assumptions in data analytics and modelling. For more information about Claire see https://people.ucd.ie/claire.gormley;

Dr Fintan Costello, is an Associate Professor in the School of Computer Science, University College Dublin, Ireland. His research interests cover a number of different areas in computer science, psychology and maths. His main interests are: biases in human reasoning and decision making; processes of rational inference in cognition; the origins of bias and rationality in human thought; computational models of probabilistic reasoning; computational models of decision making. He will speak on Bias and rationality in human reasoning (and why the same biases apply to AI). For more information about Fintan see https://people.ucd.ie/fintan.costello.

Dr Susan Leavy is an Assistant Professor in the School of Information and Communication Studies, University College Dublin, Ireland with research interests in artificial intelligence and digital policy, developing interdisciplinary frameworks for the governance and regulation of machine learning algorithms. She will speak on Gender bias and Artificial Intelligence. For more information about Susan see https://people.ucd.ie/susan.leavy

FacilitatorDr Paula Carroll, UCD, Chair WISDOM Forum

Relaying the following communication from Dimitris Bertsimas (MIT) & Dick den Hertog (Tilburg University)

Dear all,

COVID-19 is one of the big challenges our society is facing nowadays, and there are many more. We believe that Analytics can be of much value to improve our world. It is encouraging to see that more and more (especially young) Analytics researchers are enthusiastic to use Analytics to make this world a better place. Analytics has, e.g., already contributed significantly to the Sustainable Development Goals of the United Nations. 

To make these contributions of Analytics for a Better World more visible, and to stimulate research in this area, we have started a new initiative: “Analytics for a Better World Webinars (ABW-W)”.   Every month we will organize one webinar (most probably via Zoom) on a high societal impact Analytics project. The focus of the webinars is not on theoretical innovation, but on impact. These webinars will be recorded, and the videos can be used in your Analytics courses.

The first speaker is Prof. Dimitris Bertsimas (MIT, Cambridge) who will present the ongoing  work of his group of 20+ PhD and Master students and colleagues at MIT (http://www.covidanalytics.io/team) on a variety of aspects of COVID-19 as detailed in  covidanalytics.io. The website contains many  downloadable models and data.

Specifically, he will discuss  

1) a new epidemiological model of the evolution of COVID-19, detailed in https://github.com/COVIDAnalytics/DELPHI

2)  a new machine learning model (based on optimal classification trees) for predicting mortality using data from an Italian hospital from Cremona Italy detailed in http://www.covidanalytics.io/risk_calculator. Depending on progress he will discuss how to prioritize patients to use ICUs to save more lives.

3) a new optimization model for allocating ventilators  among states in the US detailed in http://www.covidanalytics.io/ventilator_allocation

4) a data generation process from 130+ papers written in March 2020 regarding COVID-19 detailed in http://www.covidanalytics.io/dataset  and insights gleaned from it http://www.covidanalytics.io/interactive-graph

The emphasis of this work has been rapid prototyping and implementation. This talk also represents an invitation to researchers around the world to contribute with ideas and analyses of their own in a collaborative spirit with the objective to address this pandemic using analytics. 

The precise date and especially the time, depends on the geographical locations of the participants, and will be determined later.

If you are interested in participating in ABW-W, please write an e-mail to Dick den Hertog (D.denHertog@tilburguniversity.edu). 

Please, feel free to forward this e-mail to others who might be interested in this new initiative.

Kind regards,

Dimitris Bertsimas (MIT, Cambridge, US)
Dick den Hertog (Tilburg University, Tilburg, The Netherlands)