Industrial Problems Seminar

In collaboration with the Minnesota Center for Industrial Mathematics, the Industrial Problems Seminars are a forum for industrial researchers to present their work to an audience of IMA postdocs, visitors, and graduate students, offering a first-hand glimpse into industrial research. The seminar series is often useful for initiating contact with industrial scientists. The IMA’s seminar series is the oldest and longest running seminar series in industrial mathematics.

Seminars take place Fridays from 1:25-2:25 p.m. in Lind Hall 325 or virtually by Zoom. Please check the individual seminar page for details.

The seminars are organized by Gilad Lerman, School of Mathematics, University of Minnesota.

Past seminars

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2024–25

2024–25

September 13, 2024

From Graduate Research to Industry Impact: Navigating Your Early in Career Path
Brooke Logan Ogrodnik (Metron)

September 20, 2024

Quantitative Finance - The Confluence of Statistics, Mathematics, and Guessing
Chris Jones (US Bank)

September 27, 2024

Applied Machine Learning and Computer Vision: Solving Industry Challenges in Consumer Products
Sajad Vahedizade (3M)

October 4, 2024

From academia to Industry. Old and new challenges and strategies.
Luis Duque Alvarez (Meta)

October 11, 2024

The Impact of High-Performance Computing on Linear Solver Algorithms and Mathematical Software
Ulrike Meier Yang (LLNL)

October 18, 2024

An Overview of Mathematics behind Semiconductor Technology 
Yue (Joey) Liu (Micron Technology)

October 25, 2024

Formally verified AWS authorization 
Sean McLaughlin (Amazon Web Services)

November 1, 2024

Mathematics for finding the right dose: my journey from academia to the pharmaceutical industry
Marco Avila Ponce de Leon (Mathworks)

November 8, 2024

Regulatory Science Challenges for AI Imaging Devices 
Michelle Mastrianni (FDA)

November 15, 2024

Evolution of Diffusion Models: From Birth to Enhanced Efficiency and Controllability
Chieh-Hsin (Jesse) Lai (Sony)

November 22, 2024

Transitioning from Professor to Data Scientist
Harini Chandramouli (NextEra Energy)

December 6, 2024

From Sabermetrics to Statcast
Dane Sorensen (Minnesota Twins)

January 31, 2025

Intelligent Sampling Strategy for Online Monitoring of Complex Systems
Honghan Ye (Solventum)

February 7, 2025

Between Research and Reality: A Industrial Machine Learning Practitioner’s Point of View
Tianyi Mao (Helm.ai)

February 14, 2025

From Research to Reality – challenges and opportunities in complex system design
Ian Levitt (NASA)

February 21, 2025

Out of Academia
Kenneth Chuk (Robinhood)

February 28, 2025

The Human Side of Data: Using Data Science to Drive Social Impact
Liz Sprangel (Hennepin County)

March 7, 2025

Lecture: Abeer Madbouly 
NMDP

April 11, 2025

Nonlinear inverse problems in semiconductor manufacturing
Christopher A. Wong

April 18, 2025

From The Three-Body Problem to Quantitative Finance
Chen Shi (Morgan Stanley)

April 25, 2025

Machine learning and its application in industry: science, e-commerce and more
Yiran Li (Microsoft)

May 2, 2025

Mathematical Biology in the Pharmaceutical Industry: A Quantitative Systems Pharmacology Model of Rheumatoid Arthritis
Maria Munoz Lopez (Simulations Plus, Inc.)

2023–24

2023–24

September 8, 2023

Scalable AI for autonomous driving and robotics 
Michael Viscardi (Helm.ai)

September 15, 2023

Computable Phenotypes for Long-COVID in EHR data 
Miles Crosskey (CoVar Applied Technologies)

September 22, 2023

Sampling diffusion models in the era of generative AI 
Morteza Mardani (NVIDIA Corporation)

September 29, 2023

What makes an algorithm industrial strength? 
Thomas Grandine (University of Washington)

October 6, 2023

Navigating Interdisciplinary Research as a Mathematician 
Julie Mitchell (Oak Ridge National Laboratory)

October 13, 2023

Distinct spatiotemporal tumor-immune ecologies define therapeutic response in NSCLC patients 
Sandhya Prabhakaran (Moffitt Cancer Centre)

October 27, 2023

The Impact of Linear Constraints in Mean-Variance Optimization
Christopher Bemis (X Cubed Capital Management)

November 3, 2023

Autoencoders for time series anomaly detection 
Parker Williams (Rivian Automotive)

November 10, 2023

Language and graph foundational models: Distillation and pretraining 
Vasileios Ioannidis (Amazon Search AI)

November 17, 2023

The Ever-Evolving Role of Data Science in an Organization
Katy Micek (Paramount)

December 1, 2023

Quantitative Ecology: My career in applied mathematics with the USGS 
Richard Erickson (U.S. Geological Survey)

December 8, 2023

Bringing AI to Healthcare – Application of Large Language Models to Interpret Complex Microbiome Data
Leo Grady (Jona)

January 19, 2024

My Early Career as a Data Scientist in Renewable Energy 
Sarah Milstein (NextEra Analytics)

January 26, 2024

How much math do you really need to make markets in stock options?
John Dodson (Options Clearing Corporation)

February 2, 2024

Lessons learnt on the path from academia to industry and entrepreneurship 
Simon Adar (Code Ocean)

February 16, 2024

Algebras to Insights: my journey from mathematics to data science
Kari Eifler (Microsoft)

February 23, 2024

Applications of Artificial Intelligence in Smart Manufacturing – The Cargill Perspective 
Abhishek Roy (Cargill)

March 1, 2024

Data Science Career in Tech Companies
Jeremy Gu (Shipt)

March 15, 2024

Math in Sports, for Fun and Profit
John Sears (Los Angeles Dodgers)

March 22, 2024

Computer vision, mostly without AI
Elena Yudovina (CyberOptics)

March 29, 2024

Viva la Revolución of Open Source Large Language Models: Unleashing the Dark Horse in AI Innovation
Patrick Delaney (BloomBoard)

April 5, 2024

Academia, to Industry, to the NBA – Navigating a Non-Academic Career with a PhD
Daniel Martens (Minnesota Timberwolves)

April 12, 2024

Graph AI: Science and Industrial Applications
Jie Chen (IBM Research)

April 26, 2024

Sharing Experiences from MUDAC 2024

2022–23

2022–23

April 28, 2023

Some Elementary Economics (& Physics) of the Electricity Grid
Sriharsha (Harsha) Veeramachaneni (WindLogics)

April 21, 2023

Squishy Mathematical Reasoning in a Robotics Start-up 
Michelle Snider (Service Robotics & Technologies)

April 14, 2023

A Varied and Winding Math Career in Industry 
Laura Lurati (Edward Jones)

March 31, 2023

Working as an Artificial Intelligence Advisor to the US Government
Mitchell Kinney (The MITRE Corporation)

March 24, 2023

Applied Math at Boeing 
Brittan Farmer (The Boeing Company)

March 3, 2023

Meta-Analysis of Randomized Experiments: Applications to Heavy-Tailed Response Data
Dominique Perrault-Joncas (Amazon)

February 10, 2023

Math & Money: Career Paths in Financial Services
Margaret Holen (Princeton University)

February 3, 2023

Identifying and achieving career goals
Brittany Baker (The Hartford)

January 27, 2023

An Overview of Open Problems in Autonomous Systems
Natalia Alexandrov (NASA Langley Research Center)

January 20, 2023

Quantitative Careers in the Medical Device Industry
Luke Jacobsen (Medtronic) and Jeff Lande (Medtronic)

December 9, 2022

Data Science to Software Engineering and Back Again
Cora Brown (Bridge Financial Technology)

December 2, 2022

How to optimize a power grid
Austin Tuttle (Open Systems International)

November 18, 2022

Shaping Your Own Career as a Mathematical Biologist
Nessy Tania (Pfizer)

November 11, 2022

Using cloud computing? You might benefit from data science!
Marc Light (Censys.io)

November 4, 2022

Seek Truth, Create Value — An engineer’s perspective on 3M “Science. Applied to Life.”
Fay Salmon (3M)

October 28, 2022

AI Model Inspector: Towards Holistic Adversarial Robustness for Deep Learning 
Pin-Yu Chen (IBM)

October 14, 2022

Navigating early career steps in industry 
Nicole Bridgland (Fulcrum)

October 7, 2022

Navigating a Career Path, a Case Study 
Paula Dassbach (Medtronic)

September 30, 2022

Capacity Planning for the Cloud
Alex Gutierrez (Google Inc.)

September 23, 2022

Research Problems in Quantitative Finance
John Goes (GMO)

September 16, 2022

Simplicity Bias in Deep Learning
Prateek Jain (Google Inc.)

2021–22

2021–22

April 29, 2022

Simplifying Federated Learning Jobs With Flame
Myungjin Lee (Cisco)

April 08, 2022

Data Science in Business vs. Academia
Philippe Barbe (Paramount)

April 1, 2022

Creating Value in PE Using Advanced Analytics
Erik Einset (Global Infrastructures Partners)

March 25, 2022

Multi-Agent Autonomy and Beyond: A Mathematician’s Life at GDMS
Ben Strasser (General Dynamics Mission Systems)

March 18, 2022

Musings from a Computer Vision Career
Evan Ribnick (Reveal Technology)

February 25, 2022

Data Science @ Meta
Zeinab Takbiri (Facebook)

February 18, 2022

Towards a Better Evaluation of Football Players
Eric Eager (ProFootballFocus (PFF))

February 11, 2022

Best Practices A Data Scientist Should Know
Hande Tuzel (Sabre Corporation)

February 4, 2022

Data-Model Fusion to Predict the Impacts of Climate Change on Mosquito-borne Diseases
Carrie Manore (Los Alamos National Laboratory)

January 28, 2022

Pointers on AI/ML Career Success
Paritosh Desai (Google Inc.)

December 14, 2021

New Methods for Disease Prediction using Imaging and Genomics
Eran Halperin (UnitedHealth Group)

December 10, 2021

From Perception to Understanding: The Third Wave of AI
Tetiana Grinberg (Intel Corporation)

December 3, 2021

Licensed to Analyze? An In-Depth Look at the Data Science Career: Defining Roles, Assessing Skills
Hamit Hamutcu (Initiative for Analytics and Data Science Standards (IADSS))

November 19, 2021

Certified Robustness against Adversarial Attacks in Image Classification
Fatemeh Sheikholeslami (Bosch Center for Artificial Intelligence)

November 12, 2021

Lessons Learned in Deploying AI in Manufacturing
Eric Wespi (Boston Scientific)

November 5, 2021

Data Science @ Instacart
Jeffrey Moulton (Instacart)

October 29, 2021

Challenges in Building Intelligent Search Systems
Jiguang Shen (Microsoft Research)

October 22, 2021

Predicting Tomorrow: Industrial Forecasting at Scale
Jimmy Broomfield (Target Corporation)

October 15, 2021

Data Scientists under attack!! Let's help them together
Sharath Dhamodaran (OptumLabs)

October 8, 2021

Research and Opportunities in the Mathematical Sciences at Oak Ridge National Laboratory
Juan Restrepo (Oregon State University)

October 1, 2021

Long-term Time Series Forecasting and Data Generated by Complex Systems 
Kaisa Taipale (CH Robinson)

September 17, 2021

SIAM Internship Panel
Montie Avery (University of Minnesota, Twin Cities)

September 10, 2021

Being Smart and Dumb: Building the Sports Analytics Industry 
Dean Oliver (NBA's Washington Wizards)