Videos

I periodically give talks that I think are of interest. Sometimes I have recorded the entire talk; other times I have broken the talk into segments so you do not have to listen to the entire presentation.

• Framing decision problems — part 2 of talks I presented to classes at Loyola University and MIT. It presents the central ideas of framing decision problems, starting with the three questions on metrics, decisions, and uncertainties. This section is the heart of the presentation, and is aimed at people who do not have analytical training but who want to learn how to ask the right questions. The framing questions form the foundation for modeling any decision problem.
• How to Teach Optimization — based on a talk I gave to Cornell’s Department of Operations Research and Financial Engineering in 2025. It makes the point that most deterministic optimization problems (e.g. linear / nonlinear / integer programs) are used for decisions that are made repeatedly over time, which means they are sequential decision problems. This means the deterministic optimization problem is a policy for a sequential decision problem.
• Learning While Doing — a powerful idea to improve operations is to implement a simple policy that is typically parameterized. Then, without building a model, dynamically adjust the tunable parameters based on experience in the field. We illustrate this concept using the context of optimizing the parameters as an online learning problem using a process we call “learning while doing.”
• Presentation at Toyota’s North American Headquarters (July 2025) — a 90-minute talk, broken into five parts, on the universal modeling framework presented to Toyota. The talk was aimed at a broad audience — over 300 people attended.