Dr. Büyüktahtakιn Toy with SysOptiMaL members perform research on advancing the state of the art in multi-stage stochastic combinatorial optimization with a mix of theory and algorithms. Their on-going research investigates deep machine learning and supervised learning algorithms to predict optimal solutions to mixed-integer programs under uncertainty. The SysOptiMaL advisor, Dr. Büyüktahtakιn Toy's work has been pioneering epidemic disease modeling and logistics optimization to surveille, control and prevent epidemic diseases in healthcare, agriculture, and forestry, e.g., infectious diseases that ravage the human body, such as the COVID-19, Ebola virus disease (EVD), and HIV, and invasive species that create havoc on forests, such as the emerald ash borer (EAB) in North America and Canada, Sericea Lespedeza damaging agricultural products in the Great Plains, and flammable buffelgrass in Sonoran Desert. The results, models, and methodologies that arise from her work have helped policymakers in healthcare and ecology optimize the location and timing of resource allocation under limited budgets.
Dr. Büyüktahtakιn Toy is the recipient of the NSF CAREER Award co-funded by the ENG Environmental Sustainability program and the NSF Division of Mathematical Sciences (Applied Mathematics, Computational Mathematics, and Mathematical Biology programs).
Research Keywords
Optimization, Machine Learning (ML), Artificial Intelligence (AI), Spatio-temporal Resource Allocation, Game Theory, Prediction, Search, Prevention, and Control Models, Data Analytics, Security, Environment, Energy, Sustainability, and Healthcare, Decision-Support Tools, COVID-19, Ebola, Emerald Ash Borer (EAB), Epidemics-Logistics
Funders
Our lab has been funded by NSF Early Career Award, NSF EPSCoR, the U.S. Office of Naval Research (ONR), Unites States Department of Agriculture (USDA), USDA Forest Service, and Flossie West Foundation among others with an award amount of $2.5M.
SysOptiMAL advisor Dr. Buyuktahtakin Toy is honored to have been invited to serve as an Associate Editor for the INFORMS Journal on Computing, starting April 2024.
News release here published by the US Forest Service Office of Communications featuring our paper (Kibis, Buyuktahtakin, and Haight et al., 2021), 2022
The ISE magazine 2022 April issue featured our IISE-T HSE article on “epidemic-vaccination-logistics”. Here is the link for the related article.
