Conference Video: Gwen Spencer, PhD - Network Science: From Beautiful Mathematics to Driving Real-World Decisions
This is Gwen Spencer’s Tech Talk from the WIDS Puget Sound Conference 2020. Enjoy!
ABSTRACT:
Networks provide a powerful modeling tool to capture spatial heterogeneity and connectivity, and challenges become even more meaty when uncertainty is in the mix. At Convoy, I create algorithms to maintain a balanced flow of long-haul trucks that is crucial to sustaining supply chains in North America. Moving from a clean mathematical model to an automated real-time system that eats noisy data for breakfast has been an awesome journey. I’ll motivate what is hard about our rebalancing problem (e.g. where we have to make high impact decisions with partial information) and mention contrasts with other balancing/rebalancing problems like bikeshare (e.g. Jump, Lime) and carshare (e.g. Uber, Lyft).
Gwen is an Operations Research Scientist at Convoy and a returning Seattle native. After a math major at Harvey Mudd College, Gwen earned her PhD in Operations Research at Cornell. During her time as an academic, Gwen's research program bridged applied and pure topics in Mathematical Modeling, Algorithms, Data Science, Stochastic Optimization, Network Science, and Theoretical Computer Science. After two years in an interdisciplinary postdoc (joint between environmental economics and computer science), Gwen was on the Mathematics and Statistics faculty at Smith College for 4.5 years. Smith is a women’s college in MA where 40%+ of students have at least one major in STEM. Gwen has had an awesome transition to industry. She feels lucky to have found an early-stage startup with a lot of high-ownership opportunities and the ability to contribute to fundamental problem formulation.