OIS faculty member is also Chair-Elect beginning November 2017

Assist. Prof. Asil Oztekin at desk
"It will be an honor for me to represent UMass Lowell globally at such a large-scale research interest group," Asst. Prof. Asil Oztekin says of being vice chair of the INFORMS Data Mining Section.

12/09/2016

Asst. Prof. Asil Oztekin of the Operations and Information Systems department has been elected to serve as vice chair of the Institute for Operations Research and Management Sciences (INFORMS) Data Mining Section, the largest special interest group of its kind in the world featuring faculty and Ph.D. students primarily from business management, industrial engineering, and computer science.

“It will be an honor for me to represent UMass Lowell globally at such a large-scale research interest group, which has conventionally been led by top-notch research universities’ faculty members so far,” says Oztekin, who will serve as the Chair of INFORMS Data Mining Section from November 2017 through November 2018.

For the second consecutive year, Oztekin served as managing chair of the 11th Data Mining & Decision Analytics Workshop, held Nov. 12, 2016, in Nashville. The workshop is traditionally held in conjunction with the INFORMS annual conference, which was this year attended by Management Information Systems Ph.D. students Hasan Kartal and Xiaoping Liu, along with their adviser Prof. Xiaobai Li. Kartal chaired a mini-session at the conference, which provided him with networking opportunities.

“It was good for both of the students to be involved,” says Oztekin. “They said it was very inspiring.”

As the managing chair, Oztekin introduced three new components to the workshop this year that he says were well-received: an Editors Panel, a Best Paper Award Contest and two special issues associated with the workshop — “Data Mining & Decision Analytics” within the Decision Sciences journal, and “Business Analytics: Defining the Field and Identifying a Research Agenda” within the European Journal of Operational Research, both of which are guest co-edited by Oztekin. He says the Editors Panel consisted of high-impact journal editors who shared hints about best and worst practices to publish in their journals.

“It was amazing to get first-hand insights from such high quality journals’ editors,” Oztekin says. “Even well-established professors in the audience were taking notes as editors were giving such hints. It was followed by a Q&A session. That brand new panel was indeed phenomenal.”

The journals represented were: Annals of Operations Research, Decision Sciences, Decision Support Systems, European Journal of Operational Research, Information Systems Frontiers, Information Systems Research, INFORMS Journal on Computing, Manufacturing & Service Operations Management, and Omega: The International Journal of Management Science, and Production & Operations Management.