INDUSTRIAL AND MANAGEMENT

SYSTEMS ENGINEERING

Kudos to Informs Student Chapter Officers! Going Once… Going Twice… Sold!!!

CUM LAUDE AWARD If you thought auctions were only used

AND to sell antiques and paintings, think
JUDITH LIEBMAN AWARD again!! They play a great role in keep-
ing our air clean. Are you wondering
Thanks to the dedicated efforts of all its officers and the con- what I am talking about? Here’s what I
stant support of our chapter advisor Dr. José Zayas-Castro, mean.
INFORMS Student Chapter at USF was recently presented
Cap-and-trade programs to limit CO2
with the Cum Laude Award at the national level. The pur-
emissions into our atmosphere have
pose of this award was to recognize the achievements of the
been introduced in several states in the US and countries
student chapter. The award was presented to the officers at
around the world. In simple words, currently, electricity
the Chapters/Fora Breakfast at the INFORMS Annual
generators in some states need allowances to pollute. These
Meeting in Washington D.C., October 2008.
allowances can be allocated by the government in two ways
Furthermore, at the same award ceremony, Vishnu Nanduri, 1) via “grandfathering” or 2) by auctions. Grandfathering
won the Judith Liebman Moving Spirit Award for out- means to give the allowances away for free. Grandfathering
standing service to the student chapter. Vishnu Nanduri, of allowances has resulted in windfall profits for generators
who served as the President of the chapter for 2007-2008, in the European Union. To avoid this scenario, some states
was nominated by the current committee for this national in the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI) are auc-
award. tioning a portion of allowances and grandfathering the rest.
There is widespread acceptance among economists and pol-
icy makers, that auctions are a simple and transparent
method of allocating allowances. Auctions ensure that the
polluters pay a price for dirtying our atmosphere. This
“price” is expected to drive dirty generators to invest in
cleaner and greener generating technologies like solar,
wind, nuclear, and geothermal. It is believed that even if
allowances are given for free, generators will still raise cus-
tomer prices, due to the costs associated with required
emissions reductions. Therefore, economists believe that
auctioning of allowances raises enough money to offset any
potential cost increases for consumers.
The recently concluded allowance auction in RGGI states
has raised over $38.5 Million. According to the website
www.energy.gov, participating states like Connecticut,
Standing L to R: Vishnu Nanduri, Wilkistar Otieno, Laila Cure, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Ver-
Diana Prieto, and Dayna Martinez mont will invest the proceeds from the auction in energy
Kneeling L to R: Chaitra Gopalappa and Patricio Rocha efficiency and renewable energy technologies and other
Volume 2, Issue 4 programs that benefit consumers.
Fall 2008 So, auctions do help keep the air clean.
ived By Vishnu Nanduri, Ph.D. Candidate, IMSE
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Pre-El bility M ineering
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 Pre-Election Polls. The time of reckoning has arrived

During the last weeks of the past presi- error (AAE). Only PPP obtained an AAE less than 1 (0.55).
dential campaign, we heard a lot about ARG and Survey USA ranked second and third with AAE
polls showing that Senator Obama was 1.05 and 1.34, respectively. Interestingly, YouGov obtained
ahead in these and those states while the highest (and thereby, worst) AAE, 3.78 (YouGov was in
Senator McCain was ahead in some oth- the group with highest accuracy considering the success rate
ers. Moreover, there were occasions in index). The state with the smallest AAE was Missouri
which a poll showed Senator McCain (several of the polls predicted a tie), whereas the state with
ahead in one state by a relatively sizable the highest AAE was Indiana with 3.8 (this result is in accor-
margin while another poll in the same state obtained in the dance with the low success rate obtained for Indiana; interest-
same week showed Senator Obama ahead. I decided to un- ingly, Colorado was the second worst with an AAE of 3.0).
dertake the task of comparing the results obtained by several
polling companies during the last weeks of the campaign with The plot-matrices (Figures 1 and 2) summarize the results
what really happened on Election Day. (AAE, y axis; Success rate, x axis). So if you ask me, what
polling company will I trust for future elections? I am
I considered a group of “interesting states” (interesting from tempted to say ARG and PPP (despite learning that PPP is
the election point of view), Florida, Indiana, North Carolina, connected with the Democratic Party and their polling results
Colorado, Virginia, and Missouri. The polls I considered in could have been more wishful thinking than anything, but
the comparison were performed by Reuters/Zogby (in all 6 then again, numbers do not lie and PPP obtained the smallest
states, excepting Colorado), Fox/Rasmussen (all 6 states), AAE).
Survey USA (all but Colorado), YouGov (all 6 states), Public
Policy Polling (PPP) (all 6 states), American Research Group
(ARG) (all 6 states), Mason/Dixon (all but Indiana), and
CNN/Time (all but Indiana). I looked at two basic indices:
the average absolute error (regardless of who the poll pre-
dicted would carry the state), and the success rate in predict-
ing the winner of the state. On the latter index, PPP, ARG,
YouGov, and CNN/Time obtained 100% success rate (I as-
sumed a tie was a correct prediction in the states where the
final difference was less than 1%: Indiana, North Carolina,
and Missouri). The polls that ranked lower on success rate
were Reuters/Zogby and FOX/Rasmussen with 60%. In
North Carolina, Colorado, Virginia, and Missouri (as of No-
vember 14, Senator McCain is slightly ahead in Missouri) all Figure 2: States and Success Rates; AAE, y axis; Success rate, x axis
the polls correctly predicted the winner (the above assump-
By Patricio Rocha, Ph.D. Candidate, IMSE
tion about ties was also considered in this calculation). On the
other hand, in Indiana only half of the polls were right in their
predictions.
Congratulations!
The situation changes when looking at the average absolute
Winner of the
USF College of Engineering Research Week
Poster Competition

USF Engineering
Research Week
Poster Competition Award:
Athina Brintaki
Ph.D Student and
INFORMS Officer
Figure 1: Polling Companies and Success Rates;
AAE, y axis; Success rate, x axis

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Research Corner
Reliability Modeling in Nano-Scale Manufacturing
Last year, INTEL, the world’s largest electronic strate, a channeling effect conducts current between the source
chip producer announced that, “it was overhaul- and the drain . In this case, a perfect dielectric should provide
ing the basic building blocks of information sufficient insulation between the transistor terminals.
age.” The milestone was achieved by introduc- The continued scaling of transistors is motivated by the quest to
ing a new generation of faster and more energy (1) increase circuit density per chip area,(2) increase the transis-
efficient nano-scale electronic processors. tor’s operating speed and (3) lower the cost per function of elec-
INTEL researchers believe this marked the most significant tronic devices. Notwithstanding these positive effects, concomi-
change in the materials and processes used to manufacture the tant reliability challenges have been brought about by the pro-
silicon-based microchips the company pioneered four decades gressive scaling of the transistor dielectric to a recent order of
ago. These achievements are attributed to the advancements in less than 5nm. Such ultra thin dielectric insulators suffer cur-
the transistor technology over time. rent leakage as a result of randomly generated defects within
Transistors are one of the fundamental building blocks of a the dielectric. The defects form a conduction pathway that al-
chip, and they provide the switching functionalities required in low current to leak between the transistor terminals.
integrated circuits. Since their invention, transistors have pro- To address the reliability challenges, our research group hopes
gressively been down-scaled geometrically. Today, Very to study the failure effects of recently developed germanium
Large-Scaled Integrated Circuits (VLSIs) in electronic devices based transistors in Stanford, that make use of hafnium oxide, a
are capable of containing up to several billions of transistors. dielectric that has higher permittivity values than SiO2. This
The transistors are so tiny that 13 billion of them can fit into the research is a collaborative interdisciplinary effort between the
head of a pin! Such is the impact of the race between AMD and USF’s Industrial Engineering Department, SEMATECH’s Cen-
INTEL for chips with less than 65nm width of circuitry in the ter for Advanced Material Research and Stanford University’s
electronic industry. Center for Integrated Circuits. Our objectives are to: (1) moni-
Figure 1 is a schematic rep- tor and characterize the failure process of the newly developed
resentation of a transistor transistors, (2) develop an accelerated degradation failure test to
arrangement. It is made up determine dielectric failure times at elevated test environments
of a dielectric insulator—in (3) construct the degradation model of the Hafnium-based di-
this case Silicon dioxide electric and the accompanying failure time extrapolation model
(SiO2), sandwiched between used to extrapolate the test data to the corresponding failure
the gate electrode and the times at normal use environments, (4) establish the underlying
silicon substrate. When a time dependent dielectric failure distribution using kernel densi-
voltage bias is applied be- ties and Bayesian informative prior constructs and (5) propose a
tween the gate elec- reliability distribution which will incrementally be used to opti-
Fig 1 Schematic representation of a Metallic Oxide mize the transistor geometry given the required performance
Semiconductor Field Effect Transistor trode and the sub-
level. By Wilkistar Otieno, Ph.D. Candidate, IMSE

Recent Journal Publications by IMSE Students

Athina Brintaki
Brintaki, A.; Lai-Yuen S.K.: “eBGF: An Enhanced Geometric Hierarchical Representation for Protein Modeling and Rapid Self-Collision Detection”, to
appear in Computer-Aided Design and Applications Journal, vol. 6 (1-4), 2009.
Brintaki, A.; Lai-Yuen S.K.: “BioGeoFilter: A Tool for Identifying Geometrically Feasible Molecular Conformations in Real-Time for Bio-
nanomanufacturing”, Transactions of the North American Manufacturing Research Institution of SME Journal, NAMRC 36, vol. 36, pp. 153-160, 2008.
Vishnu Nanduri
Nanduri, V. and Das, T. K., "A Reinforcement Learning Approach for obtaining the Nash Equilibrium of Multiplayer Matrix Games",
IIE Transactions, Volume 41, 158-167, February 2009.
Nanduri, V. and Das, T. K., "A Survey of Critical Research Areas in the Energy Sector of Deregulated Electricity Markets", To Appear in International
Journal of Electrical Power & Energy Systems, 2008.
Wilkistar Otieno
Okogbaa G.O., Otieno, W., Peng, X., Jain, S., Transient Analysis of Maintenance Intervention of Continuous Multi-unit System.
IIE Transactions, Vol. 40, No. 10, pp. 971-983, 2008.
Otieno, W., Okogbaa, G. O., Reliability Modeling of Transistor Gates at the Nanoscale, To appear in the IEEE-Explore Reliability and Maintainability Sym-
posium Annual Proceeding, Vol. Issue, Jan 26-29, 2009
Dayna Martinez
O.A. Prokopyev, N. Kong, D.L. Martínez, June 2008, "The Equitable Dispersion Problem", European Journal of Operational Research, In Press, Corrected
Proof, Available online.
3
 I♥SE... (Contributed by Dayna Martinez & Alcides Santander IMSE PhD. Students)

Our interviewee in this edition of the OR Times is Dr. Michael Weng. He is the IMSE Graduate Advisor and professor with
interests in computer numeric methods, production control, operations research, and material resource planning. However,
there is a lot you don’t know about him …
Q: What do your family members do? A: Green A: Keep working, maybe in other city.
A: My wife has her own business and my Q: Favorite sports to play and to watch.
kids are still in school. Q: Dinner at home or at a fancy restaurant?
A: I like to play volleyball, but to watch I
Q: Favorite restaurant in Tampa prefer Basketball. A: Dinner at home
Q: If you could make a wish, what would
A: Café Don Jose. Q: Favorite vacation destination
you wish for?
Q: Who you think is the student with the A: Hawaii
most solid mathematical background? A: Health and happiness for my family
Q: Wine or beer?
A: Ehsan Salimi Q: Whom would you like to meet?
A: Why not both?
Q: Your favorite actor and/or actress? A: Tiger Woods
Q: Favorite movie
Volume 2, Issue 4

A: I am an old timer… so I have to say Ar- Q: NYC or Tampa?

A: Terminator I, II and III
nold Schwarzenegger A: A small city like Tampa with NY’s life-
Q: Do you have any hobbies? style
Q: Your favorite music?
A: I collect stamps and Coins. Q: Favorite car?
A: Chinese folk music
Q: What would you like to do after retiring? A: Toyota
Q: Your favorite color?

INFORMS Annual Meeting Washington DC, October 11th-15th 2008

Fall 2008

INFORMS Volleyball Event at Riverfront Park, USF.

INFORMS Officers for the 2008-2009 Academic year

Patricio Rocha Alcides Santander

President Logistics
Ozan Oscan
Andres Uribe
Athina Brintaki,
Vice President
Publicity
Diana Prieto
Qing Wei Li
Dayna Martinez
Webmaster
Treasurers IMSE
4202 E. Fowler Ave. ENB 118 Wilkistar Otieno, Vishnu Nanduri
Laila Cure Tampa FL, 33620 OR Times Editors
Tel: (813) 974-5591
Secretary Fax: (813) 974-5953 4