Agenda

Registration and Check-in

Official Welcome

Greeting to the INFORMS Conference and informal instructions

Host: Vivek Pandit (Chapter President)

Conference Theme and Overview

Host: Vinod Cheriyan (Conference Chair)

SJSU Welcome Address

Host: Vinod Cheriyan

Professor Yasser Dessouky

Introduction to the Keynote

Host: Dhanashree Lele

Conference Keynote

Discovering Decision Strategies through Evolutionary and Multiagent AI

Risto Miikkulainen, Professor of Computer Science at the University of Texas at Austin and VP of AI Research at the Cognizant AI Lab

Featured Talk

Future Skies

Host: Dhanashree Lele

Parimal Kopardekar, Acting Director, NASA Airspace Operations and Safety Program

Refreshment Break

Featured Talk

Using AI to Accelerate Scientific Discovery for the Nation

Host: Dhanashree Lele

Michael Witherell, Executive Advisor and Former Laboratory Director, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab)

Technical Panel Discussion

Panel Moderators: Dhanashree Lele, Vinod Cheriyan

Panelists:

• Risto Miikkulainen
• Parimal Kopardekar
• Michael Witherell
• Ed Klotz

Lunch Break

Panel Discussion

Panel Moderator: Vivek Pandit

Panelists:

• Veena Mendiratta
• Sydney Lin
• Amol Kokje, Software Engineer at Google

Lightning Talk

Forecasting Data Center Energy and Cooling Demand in the Era of Foundation Models: Accuracy and Robustness

Host: Tony Qin

Yu Zhang, Associate Professor, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of California, Santa Cruz

Lightning Talk

When Should the AI Call a Human? Proactive Expert Handoff as an Optimal-Stopping Problem

Host: Tony Qin

Harshal Raut, Principal Engineer at Intuit

Refreshment Break

Lightning Talk

Human Fallback Capacity in AI-First Service Systems

Host: Tony Qin

Simrita Singh, Assistant Professor of Operations Management, Leavey School of Business, Santa Clara University

Lightning Talk

Titan Transients, Inter-Corpora Correlations, and LLM Scalability

Host: Tony Qin

Neil Gunther, Researcher at Performance Dynamics

Lightning Talk

Building Trustworthy Marketing Mix Models: AI-Assisted Operations for Enterprise Decision Intelligence

Host: Tony Qin

Aditya Puttaparthi Tirumala, Principal Data Scientist at Zillow

Fireside Chat

Fireside Chat Hosts: Tony Qin, Dhanashree Lele

Speakers: Jun (Luke) Huan, Senior Principal Scientist at AWS AI Labs; Ganesh Balachandran, Head of Product Data Science at Waymo

Closing Address

Dhanashree Lele (Vice President)

Networking Happy Hour