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Events for April 08, 2010
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Reducing Operating Room Labor Costs: Capturing Workload Information & Dynamic Adjustments ...
Thu, Apr 08, 2010 @ 10:00 AM - 11:00 AM
Daniel J. Epstein Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering
University Calendar
DANIEL J. EPSTEIN DEPARTMENT OF INDUSTRIAL & SYSTEMS ENGINEERING SEMINARTitle: "Reducing Operating Room Labor Costs: Capturing Workload Information & Dynamic Adjustments of Staffing Level"Speaker: Polly Biyu He, PhD Candidate, Graduate School of Business, Stanford UniversityABSTRACT: We study the problem of setting nurse staffing levels in hospital operating rooms when there is uncertainty about the daily workload. We develop empirical models to predict the daily workload distribution and study how its mean and variance change with the information available. In particular, we consider different information sets available at the time of decision: no information, information on number of cases, and information on number and types of elective cases. We use these models to derive optimal staffing rules based on historical data from a US teaching hospital and prospectively test the performance of these rules. Our empirical results suggest that hospitals could potentially reduce their staffing costs by an average of 39-49% (depending on the absence or presence of emergency cases) by deferring the staffing decision until procedure-type information is available. However, in reality, contractual and scheduling constraints often require operating room managers to reserve staffed hours several months in advance, when little information about the cases is known. This motivates us to consider the problem of adjusting the staffing level given information updates. Specifically, we develop decision models that allow the OR manager to adjust the staffing level with some adjustment costs when he or she has better information. We study how adjustment costs affect the optimal staffing policy and the value of having the flexibility to adjust staffing. We also demonstrate how to implement our adjustment policies by applying the optimal decision rules derived from our models to the hospital THURSDAY, APRIL 8, 2010, ANDRUS GERONTOLOGY BUILDING (GER) ROOM 309, 10:00 – 11:00 AM
Location: Ethel Percy Andrus Gerontology Center (GER) - 309
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Georgia Lum
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Multi-Functional Catalytic Reactors For Cleaner Air and Energy
Thu, Apr 08, 2010 @ 12:45 PM
Mork Family Department of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Lyman Handy Colloquium SeriesPresentsMike HaroldUniversity of HoustonAbstract:The U.S. faces the challenge of reducing its energy appetite and cleaning its air while sustaining economic growth. With fossil fuels serving as the primary energy source for the foreseeable future, it is critical that the efficiency of power generation be increased while reducing emissions. In this talk short- and long-term technology solutions are described that require the development of new types of multi-functional catalytic reactors. The short-term solution exploits the improved fuel efficiency offered by diesel-power vehicles compared to their gasoline-powered counterparts. Diesel-powered vehicles require significant reductions in emissions of nitrogen oxides (NOx) and particulates. We are investigating NOx storage and reduction (NSR) as a viable diesel emission abatement technology, which involves the application of a catalytic adsorptive reactor. Exhaust NOx is reactively adsorbed into a nitrate, which is then reduced by exhaust species, achieved by periodic operation. Our experimental and modeling results reveal that pulse injection of various reductants is effective in achieving a high time-averaged NOx conversion on Pt/Ba catalysts. Storage and reduction cycles are identified that maximize the NOx conversion and minimize reductant requirements. The results of mechanistic and modeling studies reveal a complex coupling between the catalytic chemistry and transport processes. A longer-term solution involves the use of fuel cells for distributed power generation. This approach requires efficient production of high purity hydrogen from fuels. We are investigating the use of a Pd alloy membrane reactor that integrates fuel reforming and hydrogen purification. The synthesis of novel encapsulated Pd membranes supported by porous ceramic fibers exhibit very good hydrogen flux and permselectivity. Experiments and modeling identify the membrane reactor design and operating conditions that maximize the reactor productivity and hydrogen utilization.
Location: James H. Zumberge Hall Of Science (ZHS) - -159
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Petra Pearce Sapir
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CS Colloq: Dr. Yan Liu
Thu, Apr 08, 2010 @ 03:30 PM - 05:00 PM
Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Talk Title: Learning from Structured Data: Models and ApplicationsSpeaker: Dr. Yan LiuHost: Prof. Gaurav SukhatmeAbstract: Structured-input/output data emerge rapidly in a large number of applications, such as computational biology, social network analysis and climate modeling. In this talk, I will examine two tasks under this topic: one is given the data with underlying structures, how we can recover the graph structures automatically. Specifically, we develop Granger temporal models, an emerging collection of graphical model techniques that allow us to model causal relationships from time series data by appealing Granger causality with success in biology and climate application; the other tasks is given the data with structured-input, how we can make use of the structure information for better modeling. Specifically, we develop Topic-Link LDA model, a Bayesian hierarchical model for topic modeling and social network analysis from blog data.Bio: Yan Liu is a Research Staff Member at IBM TJ Watson Research. She received her M.Sc and Ph.D. degree from Carnegie Mellon University in 2004 and 2006. Her research interest includes machine learning and data mining algorithms for business analytics, social network analysis, computational biology and climate modeling. She has received several awards, including 2007 ACM Dissertation Award Honorable Mention, best application paper award in SDM 2007, winner of KDD Cup 2007, 2008, 2009 and INFORMS data mining competition 2008. She has published over 30 referred articles and served as a program committee of SIGKDD, CIKM, SIGIR, ICDM and several workshops in NIPS and ICDM.
Location: Seaver Science Library (SSL) - 150
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: CS Front Desk
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Northrop Grumman Tech Talk - IEEE at USC
Thu, Apr 08, 2010 @ 07:00 PM - 08:00 PM
Viterbi School of Engineering Student Organizations
Student Activity
Join IEEE at USC on Thursday, April 8th for an exciting tech talk presented by representatives from Northrop Grumman's Communication Systems Center. FREE FOOD will be provided!
Location: Von Kleinsmid Center For International & Public Affairs (VKC) - 102
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engin
