ISE faculty and students share research on risk analysis at local conference

By Sarah D'Iorio

Researchers interested in risk analysis, including several faculty and students from UB’s Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering (ISE), gathered in Niagara Falls, N.Y., this summer for the Second Conference on Risk Analysis, Decision Analysis and Security.

“Risk Analysis in the Digital Era," was the theme of this year’s conference, which featured three keynotes, 13 oral presentations, and 24 poster presentations from seven countries.

Jun Zhuang, professor in the ISE department, served as conference co-chair along with Chen Wang, a faculty member at China’s Tsinghua University.

“The research field of decision analysis, risk analysis and security is not new, but we are seeing richer and richer opportunities of harnessing high-volume, high-dimensional multi-source and/or multi-modal data, or big data, to give insights for risk assessment, risk communication and risk management,” said Zhuang. “This conference provides such a platform for researchers around the world to exchange ideas and learn from each other.”

Zhuang delivered a presentation on “Tracking and Managing Misinformation on Social Media during Disasters.” Also presenting from ISE was Assistant Professor Sayanti Mukherjee who gave a talk titled “Risk Assessment Framework to Evaluate Urban vs. Rural Crime Rates Leveraging Data-driven Predictive Analytics.”

Two School of Engineering and Applied Sciences graduate students received awards for their entries in the poster session: ISE PhD student Ridwan Al Aziz for his poster titled “Application of Social Media Image Classification to Detect Infrastructure Damage during Natural Disasters,” and computer science and engineering PhD student Rudra Prasad Baksi for his poster titled “A Strategic Framework for Mitigating Advanced Persistent Threats: A Hidden Markov Model Approach.” Also presenting were UB graduate students Chris Chu (PhD student, communication), Kyle Hunt (undergraduate student, ISE) and Zhiyuan Wei (PhD student, ISE).

In addition to the technical program, the 45 conference attendees enjoyed a trip to Niagara Falls State Park and a picnic on Goat Island.

Held July 30 to August 2, 2019, the conference was sponsored by the Center for Geohazard Studies, the University at Buffalo, the Society of Risk Analysis, and Tsinghua University. The conference also recognized the efforts of more than half a dozen student volunteers from UB.