Published: March 18, 2025
Welcome to the latest in our special series of Resoundingly Human podcasts highlighting the finalist teams for the 2025 Franz Edelman Award, the Nobel Prize of Analytics, which will be awarded at the upcoming 2025 INFORMS Analytics+ Conference in Indianapolis this April.
These finalist projects represent teams from around the world who have leveraged advanced analytics to transform their organizations, address their most significant challenges, and better serve their customers and communities. Today I’m joined by members of the team representing SF Express to discuss their finalist project in the lead-up to the Franz Edelman competition.
So SF Express once collaborated with Georgia Tech in the early stages of this project. The O.R. teams were somewhat inexperienced, and we were fortunate to receive guidance from the faculty at Georgia Tech and today we want to return the favor by sharing some of our experience as well. So our team members have given talks at many universities in China and some of us also serve as part time lecturers teaching practical OR/MS at our universities. Additionally, we have hosted several competitions featuring real-world optimization problems. We hope these actions will attract more young talent to work in the industry as operations researchers.
Interviewed this episode:
Yixiao Huang
SF Express
Dr. Yixiao Huang holds a PhD in management science and engineering from Tsinghua University. Since joining SF Express in 2018, he has studied various topics on optimizing SF’s network, including same-day network design, vehicle routing problem, inter-city ground network, and green transportation. Currently, he is the chief operations research scientist at SF Technology. He has published academia papers in journals including Transportation Science, Transportation Research Part B, Omega, etc. In 2020, he was awarded the Outstanding Paper in Urban and Transportation Planning and Modeling by the TSL Society of INFORMS.
Fei Gao
SF Express
Dr. Fei Gao holds a PhD in system engineering and engineering management from City University of Hong Kong. He is a senior operations researcher at SF Technology and his work mainly focus on inter-city air network design problem. He has published academia papers in journals including IISE Transactions, Automatica, IEEE Transactions on Automation Science and Engineering, etc.
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Episode Transcript
Transcript pending.