Recently, David Simchi-Levi was invited to the Business School of HNU to give an academic report titled "Reinventing Operations Management's Research and Practice with Data Science". David Simchi-Levi is a professor of Engineering Systems at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and also a member of the National Academy of Engineering of the United States, as well as the editor-in- chief of Management Science, a top journal of The University of Texas at Dallas (UTD).

Prof. David Simchi-Levi gives an academic report.

In his report, Prof. Simchi-Levi emphasized the focus on the integration of online and offline learning to improve decision-making in operations. He noted that with key applications ranging from dynamic pricing and recommendation systems to personalized medicine and clinical trials, machine learning has been playing an increasingly important role in decision-making. Supervised machine learning has traditionally excelled at making predictions based on i.i.d offline data. However, many modern decision-making tasks require sequential decisions based on real-time online data, especially in operations management. This difference poses an important challenge in connecting offline supervised learning with online interactive learning for data-driven decision-making.

At the conference

Prof. Simchi-Levi is now the head of the MIT Data Science Lab and is also considered one of the major thought leaders in the fields of supply chain management and business analytics. Dean Yang Zhi, Deputy Secretary of the Party Committee Jiang Yanhui, and more than 100 representatives of teachers and students of HNU Business School attended the lecture. Professor Chen Yan, director of the Academic Degree Postgraduate Education Management Center, presided over the lecture.