Jim Dai

Biography

Jim Dai joined Cornell University in 2012 as a professor in the School of Operations Research and Information Engineering (ORIE). Prior joining Cornell, he held the Chandler Family Chair of Industrial and Systems Engineering at Georgia Institute of Technology, where he was a faculty member from 1990 to 2012. He is a Special Term Professor at Tsinghua University. He was a James Riady Distinguished Visiting Professor in Decision Sciences at National University of Singapore (May 2009-Apr 2011), a visiting professor at Aarhus University (Oct 1998-Dec 1998) and Stanford University (Dec 1998-June 1999), and a visiting assistant professor at University of Wisconsin-Madison (Aug 1991-Dec 1991).
Dai is an elected fellow of Institute of Mathematical Statistics and an elected fellow of Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS).

Research Interests

Jim Dai studies applied probability models for efficient resource allocations in processing networks that model service systems such as customer contact centers, data centers, hospital patient flow management, airline yield management, and ridesharing networks. Much of his research is motivated by the challenge of efficiently managing a finite capacity system facing a time-varying, uncertain load. He develops theory for using fluid limit to study stability of a processing network. He develops diffusion models such as piecewise Ornstein-Uhlenbeck processes and semimartingale reflecting Brownian motions for analy-sis and control of a processing networks. His recent focus is to use Stein's method both as an engineering tool to develop an approximation model and as a mathematical tool to establish error bound for the approximation.

• Complex Systems, Network Science and Computation
• Health Systems
• Transportation
• Applied Probability