[Time] 16:00-17:30, April 18 (Saturday), 2020

[Location] Online

Lotus Pond Rain Classroom: W141WB

ZOOM ID: 355 084 1457

Tencent ID: 125 796 427

[Speaker] Dr. Jie Song

[Host] Dr. Fang He

[Title] Matching While Learning: Perishable Resource Allocation with Online Contextual Learning

Note: We will register the seminar for the attendees by the record in Lotus Pond Rain Classroom.

[Abstract] We formulate a novel class of online matching problems with learning. In these problems, randomly arriving customers must be matched to perishable resources so as to maximize a total expected reward. The matching accounts for variations in rewards among different customer-resource pairings. It also accounts for the perishability of the resources. For concreteness, we focus on healthcare platforms, but our work can be easily extended to other service applications. Our work belongs to the online resource allocation streams in service system. We propose the first online algorithm for contextual learning and resource allocation with perishable resources. Our algorithm explores and exploits in distinct interweaving phases. We prove that our algorithm achieve an expected regret per period of O(K −1/3 ),where K is the number of planning cycles. We propose a pioneer algorithm that helps service system to optimize resource allocation decisions while learns the uncertain reward of matching customer-resource pairings.

[Bio] Jie Song is an Associate Professor (with tenure) and the Associate Dean with the College of Engineering of Peking University. She has been awarded Boya Scholar by Peking University. She received the B.S. degree in Applied Mathematics from Peking University, Beijing, China, in 2004, and the Ph.D. degree in Department of Industrial Engineering from Tsinghua University, Beijing, in 2010. Her research interests include stochastic simulation and optimization, and online algorithm design, with applications in resource allocation of complex service systems. Her research contributes to the major government strategic planning, and provide scientific quantitative decisions. Her research has been funded by National Natural Science Foundation of China(NSFC) and Chinese Ministry of Science and Technology. She is the associate editor of leading international SCI journals, such as IEEE Transaction on Automation Science and Engineering, and serves as the co-chair of Health Care Automation Management Technical Committee of IEEE Robotics and Automation Society(RAS). She won the Best Paper Award from RAS at IEEE CASE in 2013 and the Teaching Excellence Award of Peking University in 2016 and 2017.

All interested are welcome!