Spring 2019







 ALUMNI 
NEWSLETTER
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IEOR community
Alumni Profiles
Zeyu Zheng Profile
Kevin Feng M.Eng Profile
SWE Conference
Professor Shmuel Oren Retires
Prof. Ikhlaq Sidhu 
HUMU
EWB Conference Reflection
Prof. Max Shen
IEOR Alumni Team
Featured Research
2018 Awards and Grants
Alumni Placements
Our Graduates

Dear alumni, faculty, students 
and friends of the department: I am honored and excited to be serving as the new chair of the Berkeley IEOR department. Please do not hesitate to contact me with your ideas for how we can continue to be a leading institution in industrial engineering and operations research, discover groundbreaking research, and produce world-class students equipped to innovate and lead in both industry and academia. First, I’d like to acknowledge and thank my predecessor, Professor Ken Goldberg, for his service leading the department over the last two years. Ken played a key role in hiring 3 faculty and 3 staff members, establishing joint appointments for EECS Professors Pieter Abbeel and Mike Jordan, and advocating for faculty tenure and promotion cases. Ken coordinated our ABET review and accreditation, and advocated for diversity enhancement among our faculty, lecturers, grads, and undergrads (and in the new Management and Entrepreneurial Technology dual major with Haas). Ken created the Machine Learning and Data Science (MLDS) Faculty Committee, the PhD Fellowship Selection Committee, and the IEOR Corporate Affiliates Program. Raising funds from our generous alumni and advisory board members, in particular from Nancy Blachman and Tim Chen, Ken led the renovation of two IEOR facilities to create our new PhD Student Research Lab (PRSL 1) and our new state-of-the-art 49-seat Auditorium on the Etcheverry 1st Floor (1174). Ken also developed our IEOR history and contributed in countless other ways. He will take a sabbatical this spring to spend time with his family and his startup company that is developing software for e-commerce order fulfillment robots. In this newsletter, we highlight our newest member of the faculty, Zeyu Zheng, who began as an assistant professor in fall 2018 and will bring new skills and research focus to the department. We also celebrate the retirement of one of our most distinguished professors, Shmuel Oren. And we will showcase a few other stories and profiles of alums and students who are making exciting new discoveries and innovations. Looking forward, I hope to continue to work to build closer ties between alumni and the department, to help us all better collaborate. Please let me know if you have ideas for how to strengthen our ties. We will continue to organize alumni events, connect students with alums for mentorship, and we encourage alumni companies to join our Corporate Affiliates Program to recruit our students and work more closely with the department. Go Bears! Professor Max Shen Professor & Chair Industrial Engineering & Operations Research
Lunch and Learn, IEOR Communications Council

Profiles of Alumni & IEOR community 
IEOR welcomes new assistant professor, Zeyu Zheng Started Beam Solutions with a SaaS platform Breaking the glass ceiling Berkeley Citation Award, Professor of Graduate School Awarded 2018 IEEE Major Education Innovation Award Using Machine Learning for a Happier Workplace Building a Better World Named INFORMS Fellow Selected as Finalist for NBA Hackathon

Matchmaker, Matchmaker, Make Me an Online Match

Faculty and Graduate Students In Academia and Industry

Full list of graduates from BA, BS, MS, M.Eng, PhD


Chair Max Shen Contributors Smita Balaji Ken Goldberg Aya Hamoodi Wesley Jin Nanavati Low Keith McAleer Eugene Pang Emily Paszkiewicz Max Shen Sarina Xin
 Jessie Ying
Photography Yoojin Chung Keith McAleer Eugene Pang Design Keith McAleer Eugene Pang
CHAIR’S ANNOUNCEMENT
Data - x poster session This semester students had an opportunity to apply the latest data science tools and algorithms to real-life industry problems in our course Applied Data Science with Venture Applications, also known as Data-X (INDENG 135 / 290). (More photos here.)
IISE Dinner Alum and advisory board member Sujit Chakravarthy hosted a dinner and open house event for students in the Institute of Industrial & Systems Engineers (IISE) to learn more about the student experience in IEOR and brainstorm how to improve. (More photos here.)
ieor communications team The IEOR Communication Council is an undergraduate team of volunteers that help drive events and communications for the department. From left to right: Joshua Sanchez, Emma Hsu, Sarina Xin, Saba Sahebjam-Abataki, Aya Hamoodi, Samantha Torres, Lucie Kresl, & 
Leo Soto
2018 Fall Picnic The annual IEOR fall picnic brings together faculty, undergraduate, and graduate students to take a break during the busy semester and meet their fellow industrial engineers. (More photos here.)
FALL 2018 Lunch and learn IEOR graduate students coming together for Lunch & Learn, a bi-weekly event to help students share tools and practice presentation skills.
IEOR holiday Party After a long semester, students, staff, and faculty gathered at the beautiful Denniston Refectory to partake in delicious refreshments and play giant board games to relax after finals. (More photos here.)
IEOR PHOTO HIGHLIGHTS
Jonathan Li Qun Ong
IEOR NEW GRADUATE STUDENTS
Yuhao
Ding
What is the most challenging part of your job? The most challenging part of business is definitely the people. Hiring great people, helping them grow and thrive, and dealing with people issues are the biggest challenges but also very rewarding. Who is your hero and why? Since I was a kid, my hero has been Bill Gates. He was one of the first to make nerds cool, inspiring a generation. He built a big business that did a lot of good in the world, empowering a generation by putting a powerful PC on every desk. And now he’s focused on giving away a nation-sized fortune to make the world a better place. What was the most important thing you learned while studying at Cal? As a kid who grew up in a small farming town in North Carolina, Cal was pretty different for me. For the first time, I was surrounded by people who thought very differently from me. And I learned so much from them! Most importantly, I learned the value of surrounding yourself with people who are different from you, with different perspectives and life experience, and to put yourself in somebody else’s shoes before judging their perspective. The best ideas and the best creations are birthed from diverse teams. Do you have any advice for current IEOR students? 1. Make friends. This is the easiest time in life to make friends, and you will be shocked by how small of a world it is out here. The stronger relationships you build, the better you will be prepared. 2. Work during school, start now. Your learning in classes is multiplied in effectiveness once you start working. Second, it’s the easiest way to get a great job afterwards -- either directly.
Ruijie Zhou
IEOR ALUMNI PROFILES
Andrew Shi Ding
Mahan Tajrobehkar
Vanshika Bansal
New Ph.d. Students
Ran Meng
ANDREW LAFFOON BS (‘05) CEO, Mixbook
Yoon
Lee
Yingxin Chen
Ruojie Zeng
Ilgin
Dogan
Jasper Man Sui
Jehum 
Cho
New m.s. students
2018 ALUMNI REUNION This year alumni met in the SoMa neighborhood in San Francisco at Heavybit for the annual reunion. Alumni had a chance to speed network to meet new people and Professor Ikhlaq Sidhu gave a talk on innovation. (View Ikhlaq's talk on innovation here and see more photos from the event here.)
Spencer Wilson
Yann Fraboni
Julie 
Mulvaney
Xinyi Li
THOMAS BOEGEL MS (‘96) Vice Chancellor of Academic Affairs City College of San Francisco
What did you do after graduating Cal? I did a summer internship at Disneyland’s Industrial Engineering department, which was a great experience to see how IEOR could be used in practice. I went to Cornell for my Masters in ORIE, but wanted to come back to the bay after experiencing a cold Ithaca. I got a job as a Systems Engineer at Cisco after graduating, and started at Google four years ago. What is the most challenging part of your job? Often times people will come to me with problems they need solved, and I have to prioritize as it fits into our engineering roadmap and resources. Saying no to people or proposals and influencing without authority are two challenging PM functions, 
remembering we can’t please everyone as much as we would like to. What was your favorite IEOR class and why? The senior project with Professor Yano immensely influenced how I think about 
problems and communicate with stakeholders. So much of my job now is translating user requirements into engineering ones, and being able to communicate effectively with a variety of audiences is an invaluable skill I learned from her. She’s also one of the most caring and invested professors I’ve ever had.
What did you do after graduating Cal? I continued into the 5 year IEOR Masters program after my undergrad after which I began as a Quantitative Analyst at Trulia. I did sneak in a trip to New Zealand, Thailand, and Cambodia right after graduation! What is the most challenging part of your job? Ironically, simplifying analysis is the most challenging part. As an analyst, I need to be able to effectively communicate results and recommendations of complicated analysis to stakeholders. So turning something complicated and dense into something light and actionable is challenging. What do you miss most about being a student at Cal? I saw someone studying intensely at Starbucks the other day — headphones in, stacks of books, and study guides all over the table — and I somehow felt nostalgic of the days of studying hard during crunch time. I love learning and the feeling of accomplishment once you mastered a topic! What was the most important thing you learned while studying at Cal? The true importance of teamwork. As the scope of the problem you’re working on increases, the collective effort of multiple people with different skill-sets is more fruitful and honestly, more fun than a single person burning the midnight oil.
What is the most challenging part of your job? I think being an entrepreneur gives you challenges on the daily. Oftentimes there’s no one holding your hand or giving you constant guidance which can be tough coming from school or a traditional company where you always had a professor or boss as someone you can turn to in times of trouble or uncertainty. As an entrepreneur you need to overcome the fear of the unknown and continue pushing forward especially when thinking of giving up. What was the most important thing you learned while studying at Cal? Cal really gave me another perspective on what hard work meant. It takes it to a different level that makes everything else afterwards seem easier and/or gives you the confidence to tackle on even more challenging tasks. Do you have any advice for current IEOR students? Definitely utilize all of the resources on campus. Explore around and you can find a lot more opportunities right around the corner. Cherish the moments you spending 
learning and thriving with your fellow students, faculty and staff. What do you miss most about being a student at Cal? I miss being in an environment where everyone is so focused on a particular subject/major where learning and exploring is the main goal.
ANJALI APTE BS (‘93) Senior Director of Operations Next Step Partners
What did you do after graduating Cal? I worked as a business systems analyst, then a technical project manager at Charles Schwab. I went on to get my MBA in strategy and nonprofit management from Yale. Then I was a management consultant for a few years, then worked at a startup, then at Blue Shield as an ‘e-business manager.’ I ended up leading some training and 
development sessions in India for engineers that had been promoted to management, and that is how I got into my current industry. What are you currently working on? We have a 30+ person virtual team (mostly national but some international.) I work on planning for learning and development sessions for our clients, marketing, budget, and am currently designing a 2 day offsite for us in January. So a little bit of everything except the actual executive and team coaching - since I am not a certified coach. What was the most important thing you learned while studying at Cal? Scrappiness. Figuring out creative ways to get things done. Cal may not have all the resources that some other private universities have, but it helps in life when things aren’t handed to you.
SHIR NEHAMA BS (‘15), MS (‘16) Senior Quantitative Analyst, Trulia
What did you do after graduating from Cal? I started my career in management consulting at Accenture, before realizing that the corporate world wasn’t for me. I still remember how horrified my parents were when I left Accenture to sell solar panels door to door in San Jose. Eventually I started an e-commerce company selling diamonds that was a minor success, and that gave me enough savings to start Blueboard, which is an amazing startup / passion project. Do you have any advice for current IEOR students? Take advantage of the fact that you’re a student; people love helping out students because successful people have been in your shoes. Reach out to entrepreneurs that are building companies that you admire. Reach out to technologists that are working on things that fascinate you. Reach out to leaders at companies that inspire you. Saying that you’re a student and asking thoughtful questions can go a long way. What was your favorite IEOR class and why? The whole IEOR 190 series was incredible. I loved getting to work on projects with business students. I think if I didn’t take the 190 series I might still be in management consulting today — I’m happy it gave me the guts to go in my own direction and start a company that I was passionate about.
JASON MAO BS (‘17) Entrepreneur, Retail & Real Estate
TAYLOR SMITH BS (‘10) CEO & Cofounder, Blueboard
EDDIE LO
BS (‘11) Product Manager, Google
What is the most challenging part of your job? There was a time when my technical knowledge was the most important skill I brought to a job. Now it’s more project management and managing professional relationships. This is especially important when attempting to lead changes in organizational culture. What was the most important thing you learned while studying at Cal? I learned that I could be a college student again after having taken a break for about 5 years since getting my undergraduate degree. I learned good critical thinking skills and good learning habits. Do you have any advice for current IEOR students? Don’t just focus on your technical skills. Take a public speaking class and learn how to make a good presentation to an audience of people who are non-technical. You might not like group projects in classes, but life is a group project - learn how to lead them, and learn how to be led. What is your favorite memory at Cal? Going out on a Friday at 5 with classmates, enjoying a beverage or two, maybe a band, and enjoying Berkeley.
AVERELL WALLACH BS (‘17) Industrial Engineer, SpaceX
ANJALI GOPAL BS (‘15) Strategy Analyst, 3M
What is the most challenging part of your job? Navigating through my company’s myriad structured and unstructured data sources to try to leverage them for my projects. What was the most important thing you learned at Cal? The true importance of teamwork. As the scope of the problem you’re working on increases, the collective effort of multiple people with different skill-sets is more fruitful and honestly, more fun than a single person burning the midnight oil. What was your favorite IEOR class and why? Optimization Analytics by Prof. Ilan Adler. He’s a master teacher. I remember being 
crystal clear about every concept I learned. Another is Risk Modeling & Simulation by Prof. Lee Schruben. He has the most rememberable stories and personal experiences that were very relevant to what we were learning. Do you have any advice for current IEOR students? Don’t shy away from reaching out to alumni who are doing similar things you hope to do one day. You’ll be surprised at how helpful they are.
ZEYU ZHENG WELCOME AND PROFILE
What are you currently working on? Sending folks to Mars! I am working with a small “data team†to ensure manufacturing problems do not become a risk to launch. We developed a machine learning algorithm to detect and assess risky issues to facilitate our transition to manned space flight. What is the most challenging part of your job? Communicating my assumptions to skeptical engineers. I tend to get attached to ideas that are my own, and this can lead to healthy debate surrounding the right way to 
approach a problem. I find it challenging to get out of my own skin and look at the
 problem from another viewpoint to make sure I am making the right call. What was the most important thing you learned while studying at Cal? Explicitly state the assumptions of your model/proposed solution. Even if you are right, you often need to dig deep to explain your reasoning to convince others. Do you have any advice for current IEOR students? Don’t be afraid to make your own path. Asking friends for course advice can be 
reassuring, but they can be wrong (too)! Challenge yourself to follow your interests.
The Department of Industrial Engineering & Operations Research is excited to welcome Dr. Zeyu Zheng as a new assistant professor this year. Zheng recently earned a Ph.D. in management science and engineering and a Ph.D. minor in statistics from Stanford University. Previously, he earned a masters degree in economics from Stanford, and a B.S. in mathematics from Peking University. His research interests include simulation, data analytics, stochastic modeling, statistical learning and inference, and financial technologies.

“I feel excited to bridge operations research and data sciences, and to push data analytics methodologies to new heights. I can’t think of a better environment than IEOR for this form of research,†says Zheng.

Zheng says he looks forward to working with the ambitious faculty and students here, and the opportunity to learn from experts in many fields. In spring 2019, he will teach a course that introduces stochastic processes, as well as an advanced PhD course on stochastic methods. Zheng believes that because uncertainty in systems is so prevalent, that this is a core skill that all IEOR students should develop.

In an era where data is more available than ever before, Zheng thinks understanding how uncertainty in systems can impact our decisions is particularly important. Most problems facing business and industry alike ultimately involve human beings in the decision-making process, which will always add to uncertainty. Unlike the game of Go or Chess, where AI has recently bested top human opponents, most problems in the real-world do not have well-understood rules and states, but are full of uncertainty and incomplete information.

“People talk about data-driven decision making, people talk about machine learning to help us make better decisions, but that is one part of the story. The other part is that there are always humans making decisions, and thus always uncertainties that cannot be replaced by machine learning algorithms,†said Zheng.

Zheng believes as machines and algorithms play a larger role in our life, it will be a central challenge for IEOR researchers to figure how these machines can best work with human beings to incentivize them to reach their highest potential, while at the same time ensuring machines make humans more effective without discriminating against people or exploiting them.

Beyond how humans and machines work
together, another problem Zheng believes he will face is that problems will continue to grow larger in scale, which will mean researchers will have to come up with new methods and techniques to deal with them. 

“While methods and approaches will change, one thing that won’t change is that this department cares about real problems and bringing real value to society,†
- Professor Zheng.

JOEL PRINCE VARGHESE Meng (‘16) Senior Data Scientist, eHealth
What did you do after graduating from Cal? I worked at Apple for two and a half years in two different topics: Manufacturing Design and Operations&Strategy - and now I’ve currently been working at 3M for a year in Strategy and Business Process Optimization What is the most challenging part of your job? I work a lot internationally with both intercompany, suppliers and customers - this 
requires a lot of travel as well as strategic communication - working with both 
manufacturing and design engineers, sales and marketing and customers/suppliers cross functionally is both a challenge and a learning experience. What was the most important thing you learned while studying at Cal? Time Management and Communication skills - networking is essential and key in life and it’s a skill picked up in every single class. What was your favorite IEOR class and why? 170 - Industrial Design and Human Factors! Loved the topic, the projects were 
interactive and interesting, and Professor Goldberg made it fun. All the students were creative with their content and it was a change from the usual simulations and 
algorithms taught in other classes.
by Jessie Ying Kevin Feng graduated in 2018 with an MEng degree in Industrial Engineering and Operations Research. He currently works as the Head of Data Science for a startup called Beam Solutions, which provides financial institutions with a SaaS platform that utilizes machine learning to detect suspicious activity in financial transactions.

We had a chance to ask Kevin a few questions about life after the Berkeley MEng:
SWE CONFERENCE BREAKING THE GLASS CEILING
“It’s really exciting to see my work rapidly translate directly into a product that will benefit society.†to society,†
- Professor Zheng.
By Smita Balaji This past October, six IEOR students (pictured left-to-right above: Jessica Au, Celestina Calarde, Smita Balaji, Lucie Kresl, Emma Hsu, and Francesca Ledesma) had the opportunity to attend the National Society of Women Engineers (SWE) Conference held in Minneapolis, Minnesota with the help of funding from the IEOR department at Berkeley. UC Berkeley’s chapter of the International Organization has 400 members, 150 active, and a 35-person officer core making it not only one of the largest clubs on campus, but one of the largest within engineering. Of the six IEOR students who attended, all were officers with one being an executive member of the club.

At the conference, students had the opportunity to 
engage in a wide number of activities. This included a large career fair featuring over 100 companies, 
networking dinners, women in leadership sessions, tech talks, and much more. Aside from the conference, SWE students were able to explore the beautiful city of Minneapolis (even though it was much colder than Berkeley’s Bay Area weather), try some local food, and explore everything the Midwest had to offer — even the Mall of America!

“This was my second time attending the National Society of Women Engineers Conference and the first time as an executive of my club. As a result, I participated in many of the programs the conference had to offer,†said Smita Balaji, UC Berkeley SWE’s vice president of corporate relations, “In particular, I was able to present a research project as a part of SWE’s Team Tech competition sponsored by the Boeing company. In this competition, SWE chapters at universities team up with an industry partner and formulate and develop an engineering prototype for them. This was UC Berkeley’s first time being able to present at the conference and we couldn’t have done it without the help of the IEOR department. Our project was partnered with Depuy Synthes, a veterinary devices company under Johnson & Johnson. The project was well received, and we can’t wait to compete again next year! In addition to getting all the free swag from the career fair, especially all the IEOR companies, I was able to attend an all-day female leadership seminar called the College Leadership Institute. There, I learned skills on negotiation, career planning, and overall confidence. The best part of the conference by far was being able to hang out with my fellow SWE and IEOR friends. I wouldn’t trade this experience for the world. I’m a senior and graduating this year, so I won’t be able to go as a student anymore. But I hope to attend next year representing the company I’m working for so I can see all of my UC Berkeley SWE members again!â€
What did you do after graduation? I started work immediately after graduation and was actually already working part-time for my company for a few months before that. Luckily I had a lot of free time to hang out and vacation during the second semester since I didn’t have to worry about job hunting then. What are you currently working on? I’m now the Head of Data Science for a startup called Beam Solutions, which provides financial institutions with a SaaS platform that utilizes machine learning to detect suspicious activity in financial transactions. I’m responsible for our end-to-end data science pipeline and support the business side in areas like product management, sales, etc. A lot of people ask what my day-to-day is like, but there really isn’t a “normal†day-to-day in the startup life. What have you found most rewarding about the work you’re currently doing? It’s really exciting to see my work rapidly translate directly into a product that will benefit society. At a bigger company, it can be hard to see where exactly your work ends up downstream and it can be a while before you see it in production. Before coming to Berkeley, I was at a big firm, where I had to get through 6 months of red tape to implement Jean Fridays, so it’s nice to move at a bit of a faster pace. Plus I don’t even wear jeans that often.
What do you miss about being a student at the Fung Institute? My buddies! This is a focused 1-year program where you’ll spend a lot of time with your cohort and have the opportunity to make lasting friendships with super smart and talented people. I don’t know that my friends necessarily fall into either of those categories, but the opportunity is certainly there. Just kidding. How has the Berkeley MEng program helped you prepare for the field you’re currently in? Data science has a very direct translation from what you learn in school to what you actually do on the job, which is pretty rare these days. Everything you learn in school, granted that you’re a data-centric major like IEOR or EECS, will be useful in your day-to-day work, so all the technical courses were super valuable me. Since I also work on the product and sales side, the leadership courses came in handy as well. Do you have any advice for current Berkeley MEng students? Don’t worry so much about finding a job early on in the program. If you came to the program to build technical or leadership skills, then work on building those skills! You’re getting an advanced degree from one of the best engineering universities in the world — take full advantage of it while you’re here and I guarantee (in a non-legally binding way) that you’ll be set up for a successful career.
KEVIN FENG M.ENG PROFILE
IKHLAQ SIDHU AWARDED 2018 IEEE MAJOR EDUCATION INNOVATION AWARD

The ribbon cutting ceremony for the opening of the Center for Entrepreneurship
From left to right: Phil Kaminsky, Ikhlaq Sidhu, Ting Chuk, Pantas Sutardja, Vruti Desai, Ken Singer, and Shankar Sastry

IEOR Professor Shmuel Oren retired earlier this year and is now a professor of the graduate school (PoG). After a successful career in industry and a faculty 
position at Stanford University, Shmuel joined the Berkeley faculty in 1983, where he has made a substantial impact in research, teaching, and service. His work in engineering economics and power systems, specifically in the integration of decisions and cooperative market mechanisms in electrical power systems, earned him membership in the National Academy of Engineering, one of the highest honors for an engineer. (Read more in an earlier interview here.) This year, Shmuel also earned the Berkeley Citation (pictured above), one of the university’s highest awards. Congratulations to Shmuel on a successful career! The department thanks him for his impactful contributions in research and in the lives of students and colleagues.
Ikhlaq Sidhu, professor in the Department of Industrial Engineering & Operations Research at the University of California, Berkeley, and faculty director and chief scientist at the UC Berkeley Sutardja Center for Entrepreneurship & Technology has been awarded the 2018 Major Education Innovation Award by the IEEE Educational Activities Board (EAB) for his contributions in entrepreneurship pedagogy and innovative teaching methods.

“This award also recognizes the many incredible people at Berkeley and our global collaborators who empower others to change the world,†says Sidhu.

Among Prof. Sidhu’s contributions include the co-creation of a unique teaching method called the Berkeley Method of Entrepreneurship, which emphasizes an understanding of the mindsets and behaviors that most likely lead to entrepreneurial success.

A veteran of industry, where he earned more than sixty patents, Sidhu joined Berkeley in 2005 as founding director of a new center in the UC Berkeley College of Engineering called the Center for Entrepreneurship & Technology. With a focus on opening up the university environment, Sidhu sought to not only create innovative teaching models to change the way that students learn, but also to transform the way that entrepreneurship programs are taught.

Upon its opening, the Center offered one course: IEOR 190A: Technology Entrepreneurship. Sidhu has since grown a vibrant community of innovation activities that today include an applied curriculum of thirteen courses for over 1,500 students every year, connections with Silicon Valley’s leading technology firms, a dozen global academic university partners, and notable spin-offs such as the Fung Institute for Engineering Leadership and SkyDeck, the primary new venture accelerator of the Berkeley campus.

From the first days of the Center, Sidhu realized the value of connecting students and campus programs with the off-campus world, with networks of experts, advisors, investors and many other industry relationships. This effort started with the development of the A. Richard Newton Series, a course featuring famous guest lecturers such as Marc Andreessen (Netscape and A16Z), Marissa Mayer (Google, Yahoo!), Vinod Dahm (Father of Intel Pentium), Michael Olson (Cloudera), Charles Huang (Guitar Hero), Ben Horowitz (A16z), Auren Hoffman (LiveRamp), John Battelle (Wired magazine) and John Hanke (Google Maps, Pokemon Go). The series attracted students from across campus into a curriculum designed to help them learn to build real life technology startups as well as skills that would be useful in any professional career.

Bringing some of the world’s most interesting entrepreneurs and innovators to Berkeley made Sidhu realize that learning their mindset, behaviors, and other personal characteristics could be an important part of helping students innovate and succeed. This was one of the key insights that led to the Berkeley Method of Entrepreneurship, an approach which he developed with Ken Singer, to teach entrepreneurship and innovation that is focused on developing the mindsets of budding entrepreneurs. (Learn more about the Berkeley Method of Entrepreneurship here.)

To begin developing entrepreneurial mindset in students, Sidhu launched Berkeley’s Venture Lab in 2008 to allow students to learn ‘in-situation’ — i.e. by getting hands-on experience developing real startups and working with innovators who already had entrepreneurial mindsets. Venture Lab was the precursor to SkyDeck, which the Sutardja Center invested in along with the Haas School of Business and the Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research. As of this writing, SkyDeck now offers $100k seed grants to student teams and has supported 138 teams since its founding.

Two years later, Sidhu expanded the Venture Lab to be the Global Venture Lab. Developing global partnerships would help the SCET expand its reach further than any other entrepreneurship program in the world. Through this global initiative, the SCET would learn as well as share its philosophy of the Berkeley Method of Entrepreneurship to dozens of countries, and bring new professors, collaborators, and students to Berkeley, enriching the innovation ecosystems for all that it touched. 

With this, the Sutardja Center 
became a global hub for learning 
entrepreneurship and innovation.

Shortly thereafter, in 2011, Sidhu continued to build connections to industry when he launched the Engineering Leadership Professional Program, an executive program in Silicon Valley focused on giving rising stars in technology companies leadership skills and an understanding of emerging technologies. Since its launch, the program has been in high demand and served students from prominent companies such as Google, Apple, Yahoo!, Samsung, VMware, and Facebook. This program was developed when Sidhu realized that the insights developed in the Berkeley’s approach to entrepreneurship and innovation would also be valuable in larger companies. While developing the UC Berkeley T-shaped design of the professional master of engineering degree, he created an alternative version that was suited for executives and professionals, and thereby created the first significant executive education program for the College of Engineering. The Engineering Leadership Professional Program also helped Berkeley forge new and lasting relationships with companies, bringing projects, mentors, advisors, and other leading innovators to campus.

In 2015, the Center’s benefactors, Pantas Sutardja & Ting Chuk made an endowment gift to help sustain the center in the subsequent years. After graduating from Berkeley, Pantas and Ting lived through the entrepreneurial experience of starting and developing Marvell Technology Group. After seeing the value and growth from the Center’s first 10 years, they felt that the best way to magnify the impact of Berkeley students’ career paths was to support and institutionalize the Sutardja Center to become a permanent part of UC Berkeley.

More recently, Sidhu has turned his attention to emerging technical areas like data science, but with a focus on rapid technology implementation. He started his career with fifteen years of world-class technology development experience, and realized that students would benefit from being able to integrate mathematical theories, open source tools, and the processes and behaviors used in real life innovation. His IEOR data science class is very popular, growing at 50% enrollment per semester, and is teaching students how to build real world AI and data projects in a three month class (see data-x.blog). These projects include topics such as predicting energy prices, detecting knee cartilage conditions from CAT scans, and discovering fake news. The projects from the course, which are created using the same open source tools that are used real life technology development, are now resulting in research papers and new venture team formation.

The Sutardja Center continues to mix the future of X (where X represents emerging technologies and industries) with learning innovative mindsets, behaviors, and new teaching approaches. In 2017, the SCET launched three new labs: the Data Lab, Blockchain Lab, Sustainable Foods lab, with additional lab areas under development, because students want to learn and apply work in areas where the book not yet been written.

Today, the Sutardja Center for Entrepreneurship & Technology, led by Prof. Sidhu, offers thirteen courses, serves over 1,500 students, and continues to develop new models for developing entrepreneurs and innovators around the world by developing their mindsets and working toward an open university environment.
PROFESSOR SHMUEL OREN RETIRES
Wayne Crosby, co-founder and head of product & engineering at Humu, visited the Sutardja Center's Silicon Valley Innovation Leadership program to talk about the next industry being revolutionized by artificial intelligence and machine learning: human resources.

In Crosby’s view, the HR industry (which he estimates to be about a $400 billion market worldwide) has hitherto been the domain of intuition, without much technical analysis into what makes employees happy and successful. But considering that most people spend a large part of their lives at work, and with today’s ability to run experiments and use data to gain insights, he believes that employees can be happier and more productive, with a bit of nudging.

According to Crosby, research shows that performance and retention are driven mostly by employee happiness, and the main building blocks of happiness at work are meaning, trust, and empowerment. 

Meaning comes when an employee feels that their work is adding value for another human being. Trust means that workers feel psychological safety at an 
organization, and are comfortable being themselves. And empowerment means that employees have broad control in how their own work gets done.

“The science is really clear that these three elements are able to drive happiness,†said Crosby.

So with an idea of what makes employees happy at work, Humu can run large experiments involving small interventions with employees to see if the nudges actually can change behavior and make employees happier.

Crosby mentioned an example at Google to show how a large experiment like this would look. HR managers noticed that it was taking nine months on average for new hires to be on-boarded. After interviewing managers to ask how employees could be ramped up more quickly, managers had very similar recommendations: 1. Make sure the employee has a working laptop on day one, 2. Ensure the employee has a good startup project, 3. Ensure managers have a one-on-one scheduled, and 4. Make sure employees know where to get help. To make sure these basic things happened, HR simply sent two emails to new employees with this information. These emails were so effective that they reduced on-boarding time from nine months to six months. Through experimentation it was verified that these emails were actually the causes of the shortened on-boarding time, saving Google approximately $400 million in productivity.

Crosby first became interested in making the lives of workers better when he co-founded Zenter Inc. in 2007, while juggling time with his first newborn.

The night I applied to Y Combinator, my wife and I found out that we were expecting our first child,†said Crosby. “That was a scary moment for trying to start something new and innovative. That shaped how I started to think about how to use data and information to actually make the workplace better.â€â€¨â€¨Zenter Inc. received funding from Y Combinator and very quickly met its goal of building next-generation presentation software. Zenter was acquired by Google Inc., and not long after became known as Google Slides.

In 2009, executives at Google, where Crosby then worked as VP of engineering after the acquisition of Zenter, were inspired by a story about NBA basketball player Shane Battier in the New York Times. Battier was an interesting case because while he didn’t have impressive statistics in the traditional metrics tracked by the NBA (e.g. field goals, rebounds, steals), it still seemed to be the case that his teams performed better and his opponents’ teams performed worse when playing against him. In order to discover how Battier was making it work, analysts had to dive deep into the data to understand what he was doing that was working so well. For Google, it made them wonder: Who are the Shane Battiers of our organization? Are there employees that are making outsized contributions that are not being acknowledged?

This insight led to Google HR executives identifying Crosby as a great manager, a Shane Battier for Google. For this, Crosby received an award, but perhaps more fortuitously it led him to meet his future co-founder, Laszlo Bock, who at the time was senior vice president of people operations. Bock and Crosby immediately hit it off over their curiosity for how teams work and what makes them perform well.

After this encounter, and watching a talk by Google Fellow Jeff Dean showing how a machine learning 
algorithm learned to detect cats on YouTube, Crosby began to think in earnest about how data may be used in new and interesting ways.

Besides becoming more interested in the power of machine learning, around this time Crosby also learned about research by Jessie Wisdom, a behavioral economist working to understand why people make the food decisions that they make. Wisdom is an expert in Nudge Theory, a concept popularized by Richard Thaler, who won the Nobel Prize for his work on the subject. Crosby describes a nudge as “a stimulus that you add to the environment, that does not remove choice, that has a material impact on behavior that can be measured.†One very popular example of how a nudge works in practice is with organ donation. Behavioral economists have found a very simple 
explanation for the variance between people who do (or do not) donate their organs upon passing: whether or not the form (e.g. when one renews their driver’s license) has the organ donation checkbox checked by default or not. When the donation checkbox is checked by default, organ donation rates are much higher, as in Spain which has one of the highest rates of organ donation in the world.

Crosby saw the power of this firsthand at Google when a small nudge was implemented in the 
cafeteria by Wisdom’s team. To help Googlers make better food decisions, and to ward off the weight gain that was common among new hires thanks to abundant snacks, they implemented a very small nudge intervention. Where self-serve snack dispensers that included healthy options, such as peanuts or dried fruit, were placed side-by-side with candy, the candy dispensers were made opaque so that the colorful rainbow of the candies could not be seen. This worked quite well: they found the New York office consumed 800 fewer pounds of M&Ms.

The power of the nudge was the final piece of the idea for Humu. Bock, Crosby, and Wisdom co-founded the company together to see if they could use their combined experience with data analytics, human resources, and behavioral economics to make the lives of employees better.

"When we talk about happiness,†said Crosby, “what we are talking about is a feeling of contentment, of belonging, of waking up and not dreading going to work, but actually being excited to be there, feeling like you are contributing to something that is bigger than what you can build with your own two hands.†

HUMU USING MACHINE LEARNING
 FOR A HAPPIER WORKPLACE
EWB CONFERENCE REFLECTION BUILDING A BETTER WORLD
By Emily Paszkiewicz This year, I was fortunate enough to represent the IEOR Department at the National Engineer Without Borders (EWB) Conference in San Francisco. The event was attended by hundreds of students and 
professionals working on projects in countries all over the world. I attended workshops and heard speakers on topics relating to diversity in STEM, culturally appropriate design and implementation, and project organization and sustainability.

Across all of the stories shared, there was a common goal of applying engineering to public service to 
create a world where everyone has access to basic human needs. I was inspired to hear people talk about their times abroad, the struggles they faced and the solutions they implemented. One speaker, 
Professor Ann-Perry Witmer from the University of Illinois, gave a talk titled, “Contextual Engineering for Sustainability and Robust Design.†She described her experiences in countless communities and highlighted the importance of approaching design with a self-reflective attitude, particularly when working with a community that you are not a part of. 

The goal, she said, in your work should be to learn from the community to develop solutions together instead of identifying a solution that works in the U.S.

Witmer offered a resource she developed called “The Predictive Toolâ€, which is a checklist of things to note about a community that you are partnered with. The tool helps you to understand the biggest influences in a society, and if you answer all of the questions in the checklist and submit it on her website, she will send you a report. To access The Predictive Tool, access it at contextual.engineering.illinois.edu

My biggest takeaways included understanding ways to restructure the Berkeley Chapter of Engineers 
Without Borders to be more efficient in our work and the importance of continuously asking difficult 
questions about the ethicality of development work. The conference did its themejustice, and it really did give me a be tter understanding of how to build a better world.
IEOR student Emily Paszkiewicz (IEOR ' 21) at the National Engineers Without Borders (EWB) Conference
IEOR Professor Max Shen has been named a 2018 INFORMS Fellow . INFORMS Fellows Awards are announced once per year, and are reserved for researchers that exemplify outstanding lifetime achievement in operations research and management sciences or have demonstrated exceptional accomplishments or significant contributions to the advancement of operations research and/or management sciences over time. Prof. Shen was given the award for his research contributions in supply chain management, specifically for inventory management and facility location, and for his education of exceptional graduate students.

Professor Shen joins eleven other researchers including Andrew P. Armacost from the U.S. Air Force Academy, Vicki M. Bier from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Robert M. Freund from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Garud N. Iyengar from Columbia University, R. John Milne from Clarkson University, Jonathan H. Owen from GM Global R&D, Kavita Ramanan from Brown University, Ramesh Sharda from Oklahoma State University, Martin Shubik from Yale University, Jayashankar M. Swaminathan from University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, and Luk N. Van Wassenhove from INSEAD.

Visit INFORMS to learn more about the class of 2018.
IEOR ALUMNI TEAM SELECTED AS FINALISTS FOR NBA HACKATHON
On September 22, 2018, a team of UC Berkeley IEOR alumni (Wesley Jin 2018, Nanavati Low 2016, 
Bowen Ni 2016) was selected as a finalist out of a record 700 applicants to present their proposal titled “Analysis and Visualization of Real Time NBA Player Chemistry†at the 3rd Annual National Basketball 
Association Hackathon. The event was located at 
headquarters whereupon participants had a chance to tour locations as seen on live TV such as the 
state-of-the-art Replay Center connected to all 29 NBA arenas, meet NBA players, and learn how the league was leveraging data science to continuously improve the user viewing experience, quantify decisions for the coaching staff, and build its presence into international markets such as China and India.

The team’s research tackled NBA team’s chemistry dynamic by creating a metric that quantified the group efficiency of players on the court for a discrete time interval. The metric is updated in real time by analyzing play-by-play data and outputs both an individual player contribution and overall team performance on court. This same can also be calculated on the opposing team performance. 
 The objective was to provide 
coaches and team management an analysis of team chemistry which 
can be visualized via an AR 
headset or app. 

Player grouping compatibility would be updated, viewed on a normal distribution curve, and eventually recommended as considerations such as player injuries or exhaustion would be taken into account. A game simulator leveraged real data provided by the NBA was developed with Python (using data science libraries pandas, scikit, and numpy).

The panel of judges included Doris Burke (ESPN 
announcer, Basketball Hall of Fame 2018), Shareef 
Abdur-Rahim (Cal alum, US Men’s Basketball Team Gold Medalist at 2000 Sydney Summer Olympics), Luke Kornet (plays for the Knicks), and Howard Beck 
(journalist for the Bleacher Report). Also present at the event was Adam Silver (NBA commissioner) and deputy commissioner Mark Tatum.
PROFESSOR MAX SHEN NAMED INFORMS FELLOW

By Quico Spaen and Mark Velednitsky
Cheng Lu Rokid
Simge Kucukyavuz
Associate Professor
Northwestern University

Birce Tezel
Facebook
FEATURED RESEARCH MATCHMAKER, MATCHMAKER, 
 MAKE ME AN ONLINE MATCH
Auyon Siddiq
Assistant Professor
UCLA

Ephrat Bitton
Lyft
Andres Gomez 
Assistant Professor
University of Pittsburgh
2018 AWARDS AND GRANTS
 FACULTY AND GRADUATE STUDENTS
Victor Chan
Professor, Associate Director
Tsinghua University, 
Tsinghua Institute

Yang Wang Federal Express

Prof. Javad Lavaei
Young Investigator Award, 
The Air Force Office of Scientific Research

Prof. Candi Yano
Kimball Medal, 
INFORMS

Prof. Paul Grigas
$290,060 grant,
National Science Foundation
Prof. Dorit Houchbaum
$400,000 grant,
National Science Foundation

Prof. Javad Lavaei & 
Prof. Alper Atamturk
$360,000 grant,
National Science Foundation

Salar Fattahi
Prof. Somayeh Sojoudi
Best Paper Award, 
INFORMS 2018 Data Mining 
Alfonso Lobos
Prof. Paul Grigas
Best Student Paper Award, 
2018 Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD) Conference

Matt Olfat
Prof. Anil Aswani
Best Student Paper Award, 
INFORMS 2018 Data Mining & Decision Analytics Workshop

When you get on your smartphone and call an Uber, you don’t want to wait twenty minutes to get matched to a driver. Designing a good matching algorithm is a balancing act. On one hand, the algorithm should give you a ride quickly so that you’re a happy customer. On the other hand, the longer the algorithm waits, the more information it can gather about upcoming requests and the better its decisions become.

If Uber could design their algorithm knowing in advance all the requests for a day, it would be an “offline†algorithm. On the other hand, when it has to make decisions on the fly, the algorithm is an “online†algorithm. The problem of online matching has been studied for thirty years. It has seen a resurgence in popularity thanks to online advertising auctions and ride-sharing. In our paper, we give an algorithm for a version of this online matching problem. In fact, we show that the algorithm is optimal under certain assumptions. (Read the paper here.)

Joint work with Dorit Hochbaum and Minjun Chang

PHD PLACEMENTS ACADEMIC PLACEMENTS
Avinash Bhardwaj Assistant Professor
IIT Bombay
Chen Chen
Assistant Professor
Ohio State University
Kevin Li
Uber

INDUSTRY PLACEMENTS
Animesh Garg
Assistant Professor
University of Toronto

Yan Yang
Amazon
Jiaying Shi
AirB&B
Shiman Ding
Google

DONATE HERE
2018 ALUMNI REUNION
We did it! Thanks to generous alumni, we have completely remodeled IEOR"s only classroom, from "the dungeon" to a state-of-the-art auditorium. Naming announcement coming soon!
1174 Etcheverry Classroom Renovation
INDUSTRY PARTNERS
OUR GRADUATES
B.A. OPERATIONS RESEARCH AND MANAGEMENT
SCIENCES 
Jacob Bergquist Cheng-Fang Hsieh Liangyuan Na
Yiliu Shi

B.S. INDUSTRIAL 
ENGINEERING AND OPERATIONS RESEARCH Stella Bao Nicole Benum Anthony Blair William Campbell Natasha Angelica Christanto Jeremiah Cortez Xiarong (Sharon) Cui Devina Darmawan Andrew Ding Ethan Epstein Darren Fang Thomas Ferry Kevin Hartantio Smita Jain Wesley Jin Evan Andersen Kam Jasper Kan Rupert Kay Parisa Khorram Bryan Komala Jo Jin Leong Jessica Lin Brandon Luo Emily Ma Rebecca Martin Tyler Maxey Sophia Morgan Saeed Nassef Briana Niu Carlos Oyuela-Mora Parth Rawat Arturo Roman Ordaz Itzel Romero Waverly Runion Derek Sturgill Julia Ting Alexander Tomaso Averell Wallach Fiona Xie
 MASTER OF 
ENGINEERING Elias Asmar Tejas Baindur Souhail Bentaleb Auriane Blarre Jillian Chan Weixi Chen Yeyue Chen Youhee Choi Jordan Cox Griselda Guadalupe Cuevas Zambrano Gunsu Dagistanli Djavan De Clercq Mit Vipul Dhami Ndeye Fatou Diop Guillaume Drugeot Olabode Faleye Kevin Feng Andrew Gonzalez Lou Graniou Xinyi Gu Yuan Gu Nikhil Gupta Soumya Gupta Nicholas Hirons Robert Holbrook Ahmed Issaoui Siddhant Issar Luna Izpisua Rodriguez Devina Jain Romain Kakko-Chiloff Akshat Khandelwal Rinitha Reddy Kothapalle Rachelle Kresch Michael Lee Shuntong Lei Adrian Lemaigre Jianying Liang Yiwen Liao Xing Lin Yiqi Lin Siyu Liu Lin Lu Dhruv Madaan Segev Malool Wai Nam Man Rijul Mediratta Raouf Muhamedrahimov Alexandra Natarajan Honkanen Ackroyd Pierre-Habte Nouvellon Lorenzo Ong Yuyang Pan Vasileios Papanikolaou Hainuo Pei Flore Perillat-Periatoine John Scott Perkins Junyan Qiu Kapilesh Ramesh Matthew Rosendin Julien Dimitri Roze Ahsen Safeer Nabeel Saleem Xueying Shen Yiyu Shi Xiaohui Sun Cyril Tamraz Benjamin Tan Biru Tang Jia Xi Tay Umesh Thillaivasan Aman Deep Tripathi Bhavya Vashisht Shikhar Verma Alexandre Vincent Arpit Vyas Dayou Wang Yuntao Wang Shaojin Wei Qiwen Wu Aashray Yadav Kun Yang Yuanzhe Yang Anny You Dian Yu Xinning Yu Yan Zeng Amy Zhang Jiayi Zhang Yin Zhang Zhuxin Zhang Jiahe Zhou Lanlan Zhou Yuan Zhou Stephanie Zhu Yujun Zou Laila Zouaki 
MASTER OF 
SCIENCE

Katie Chang Mert Gurkan Zhijie Joe Huang Nathan Vermeersch 
PHD

Kevin Li Yonatan Mintz Jiaying Shi Yang Wang Mo Zhou
