- Welcome everyone to Wednesday Nite at the Lab. I am Tom Zinnen. I work here at the UW-Madison Biotechnology Center. I also work for UW-Extension Cooperative Extension, and on behalf of those folks and our other core organizers, Wisconsin Public Television, the Wisconsin Alumni Association, and the UW-Madison Science Alliance, thanks again for coming to Wednesday Nite at the Lab. We do this every Wednesday night, 50 times a year. Tonight, it's my pleasure to introduce to you Laura Albert. She's a professor in the Industrial and Systems Engineering department here in the College of Engineering. She was born in Park Ridge, Illinois, and she went to Conant High School in Hoffman Estates, Illinois, and then she went to the University of Illinois to get an engineering degree, and she got her Master's and PhD in Industrial Engineering at the University of Illinois. And then she went to Virginia Commonwealth University as a professor, in Richmond, Virginia, but in 2013, she saw the light and came here to UW-Madison. She has a really interesting range of topics tonight. She's gonna talk about Advanced Analytics, for emergency response, bracketology, and beyond. I just wish we had better news about our basketball team being in the brackets this year, but maybe next year. Please join me in welcoming Laura Albert to Wednesday Nite at the Lab.  [applause]  - Well, good evening, it's a pleasure to be here. So, as Tom mentioned, I'm a professor of Industrial and Systems Engineering, and I think today, you'll learn a little bit more about what systems are and what systems engineers do. As Tom mentioned, I'm a professor by day. I'm also an assistant dean in the College of Engineering, and I wear several other hats in addition to these two. I also write a blog. My blog is Punk Rock Operations Research, and I'm also a vice president at the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences, INFORMS. I'm the VP of Marketing, Communication and Outreach, so very active in my community and keeps me busy. There's a lot of fun things going on. Today I was asked to talk about bracketology, and also some applications of optimization and systems engineering. And so, what I'm going to do in my talk is first start with a roadmap. What's a system? What do systems engineers do? What kind of things do we study? And then, the middle part of my talk will be about my research. Most of my real research is in public sector, operations research, or public sector problems. I'll talk about emergency response today, and I'll also talk about bracketology. And at the end, I'll offer some concluding remarks about analytics and operations research. So I mentioned a couple of things, industrial engineering, systems, and operations research, and analytics. I'll start with a system, all right, so I study systems, and a system is a set of things. It can be people, vehicles, basketball teams, and even cells, and they're connected in such a way that they produce their own behavior over time, So, I like to say that one car is just a single vehicle, but a collection of cars can be a traffic jam, and that's the type of behavior that we often study. My discipline is called operations research, and it's the science of making decisions using advanced analytical methods, so we're focusing on designing systems, focusing on these interconnections between components, and really engineering a system that works better. Admiral Grace Hopper, who's a Navy Admiral, as well as a computing pioneer, said life was simple before World War II. After that, we had systems, and this is a nod to how complex it is to design and manage systems, and it's also a nod to World War II. What happened in World War II was really the birth of my discipline of operations research. The name actually refers to military operations. That's why it doesn't refer to systems or optimization even though that's a lot of what we do. And World War II was a major military campaign. We had to move troops around. We had to move around a lot of supplies to support the troops. That's a lot of what happens in