Welcome to the First APORS Youth Forum!
Yukun Cheng <ykcheng@amss.ac.cn>, Jin Zhang <zhangj9@sustech.edu.cn> and Changjun Yu <yuchangjun@126.com>
To strengthen communications among the 12 member societies of APORS (Australia, China, Hong Kong, India, Iran, Japan, Korea, Malaysia, Nepal, New Zealand, Philippines, and Singapore), especially under the shadows of COVID-19, an all-APORS virtual conference, called the First APORS Youth Forum, in which all 12 member societies of APORS participated, was proposed by Prof. Yu-Hong Dai, from the Chinese Academy of Sciences, soon after he took his position as the APORS president (2022-2024). The proposal was immediately welcomed and responded by all the APORS members and an academic committee was formed with presidents of the 12 societies. An organizing committee was established, with Prof. Govinda Tamang as a chair, who serves as the general secretary of APORS and the president of OR Society of Nepal. The two-day virtual conference of the First APORS Youth Forum was held on April 26 and 27, 2022. Janny Leung and Elise del Rosario, the current president and ex-president of IFORS, were also deeply involved in this conference.
The event provided an opportunity for young OR researchers invited by each member societies to showcase their academic achievements and frontier progress. Meanwhile, 4 prominent professors as keynote speakers were also invited. They are: Prof. Yinyu Ye, Stanford University, USA, giving a lecture on online linear programming – applications and extensions; Prof. Atsuo Suzuki, Nanzan University, Japan, presenting scheduling program in healthcare; Prof. Chung Piaw Teo, National University of Singapore, Singapore, giving a presentation on science of prescriptive analytics – integrating model with data for better decisions; and Prof. Tamás Terlaky, Lehigh University, USA, presenting quantum computing and optimization – opportunities, challenges, and perspectives. The invited young speakers from 12 APORS member societies presented their work in 4 sessions with topics on continuous and discrete optimization, along with applications using operational research methods to solve practical problems, especially in modeling strategies for logistics, healthcare, and COVID-19 pandemic.
The two-day forum opened with the welcome speeches by Janny Leung and Elise del Rosario, the current president and ex-president of IFORS. They first congratulated a successful opening of the virtual conference that brought together all the APORS members, and then delivered heartful greetings to all the invited speakers and audiences. Elise, as the past president of Operations Research Society of the Philippines, also shared her experiences in organizing the young scholar forum event during the APORS 2006 Conference. She hoped this forum to be a continuous program to help more young scholars get involved in the activities of OR communities worldwide. In the opening ceremony, the APORS president Yu-Hong Dai also thanked all the member societies for their support and involvement. As one of the APORS leaders, he hoped for more frequent and high-standard exchange events during his term.
In the closing ceremony, Francis Miranda (IFORS vice president for APORS), Nezam Mahdavi-Amiri (vice president of APORS), Govinda Tamang (general secretary of APORS), and Guochuan Zhang (organizing committee co-chair from ORSC) summarized the First APORS Youth Forum as a successful one thanks to the strong support from member societies of APORS. The upcoming APORS triennial conference in November 2022 in Cebu Philippines and December 2024 in China will warmly welcome all OR researchers from both academia and industry.
The virtual conference was scheduled carefully by considering speakers’ time zones. A technical supporting team from the Operations Research Society of China, led by Prof. Yukun Cheng from Suzhou University of Science and Technology, who was also an invited young speaker, Prof. Jin Zhang from Southern University of Science and Technology, and Changjun Yu from Shanghai University, helped to invite speakers, schedule the conference, arrange for ZOOM and live broadcast services, and ensure the smooth running of the sessions.
About 1300 people attended the forum through ZOOM meeting or watched the live streams on koushare.com and youtube.com. The 12 member societies would like to give many thanks to the above keynote speakers and the following invited young speakers, who and whose talks are listed below:
• Mirai Tanaka, the Institute of Statistical Mathematics, Japan: “A gradient method for multilevel optimization”,
• Yukun Cheng, Suzhou University of Science and Technology, China: “Incentive study on strategic behaviors in resource sharing on P2P networks”,
• Andy Chow, City University of Hong Kong, HK China:“Dynamic transport system operations with reinforcement learning”,
• Zati Aqmar Zaharudin, Universiti Teknologi MARA, Malaysia: “A reverse logistics of sustainable household solid waste management-an overview, challenges, and current works”,
• Phanindra Prasad Bhandari, Khwopa Engineering College, Nepal: “Network contraflow problem with intermediate storage capability – evacuation planning perspective”,
• Sandeep R. B. IIT Dharwad, India: “Subgraph Complementation of graphs”,
• Mazyar Zarepour, University of Auckland, New Zealand: “Districting decisions in (home) health care strategic planning”,
• Drew Mitchell, Monash University, Australia: “Generation, storage and transmission expansion planning using benders decomposition”,
• Jaeyeon Jang, Catholic University of Korea, Korea: “A deep multitask learning model for detecting unknown patterns of wafer bin maps”,
• Erfan Babaee Tirkolaee, Istinye University, Turkey: “Sustainable fuzzy multi-trip location-routing problem for medical waste management during the COVID-19 outbreak”,
• Destiny S. Lutero, University of the Philippines Los Banos, Philippines: “Mathematical modeling studies of COVID-19 in the Philippines”,
• Aldy Gunawan, Singapore Management University, Singapore: “Orienteering problem – a survey of recent variants, solution approaches and applications”.
