ISE alumni runner-up in INFORMS best student paper competition

Dr. Zhenhuan Sui, an ISE alum who graduated in the summer of 2017, was the runner-up for the INFORMS social media analytics best student paper competition. His paper entitled, “Timely Decision Analysis Enabled by Efficient Social Media Modeling,” is from his dissertation and share elements with his forthcoming paper in the INFORMS journal, Decision Analysis. It shows how social media can support timely decision-making, proposes a fast approximate approach to fit topic models, and clarifies issues relating to the race between hackers to find exploits and targets and defenders to identify vulnerabilities and obtain and apply patches or remediation. It was losing this race that caused Equifax to forfeit 150 million personal records.

Dr. Sui’s works was selected as second best from among 4 finalists which included submissions from the University of Texas (Austin – the winner) and Helsinki, Finland.