It began in January 2018, at a defining moment in my academic journey. I was in the final phase of writing my PhD thesis, preparing to submit it in April 2018. Amid the deadlines, revisions, and the pressure to finalize everything, I found myself reflecting on something deeper than the thesis itself - my research identity.
During that period, three questions kept returning with surprising force:
1) What is my core contribution?
I had worked across optimization, MCDM, fuzzy sets, and rough sets - but I wanted to distill the essence of my work into a clear, meaningful contribution that I could stand by.
2) If a layperson asks, “What is the USP of your PhD?”, what would you say in one line?
This question mattered because clarity is a test of depth. If I could not explain my work simply and confidently, then the direction was not sharp enough.
3) If I become a professor in the future, how will I present my research to students, peers, and collaborators?
I was thinking beyond the thesis - toward a long-term roadmap: a space that could communicate what I do, what I value, and what kind of problems I want to solve.
These questions were not theoretical. They were personal - and they demanded honesty. That is when the idea of a unified identity took shape: a name that could represent my research philosophy and future trajectory.
That moment became the birth of my brainchild: OptimDSS Research Lab.
OptimDSS stands for Optimization-driven Decision Support Systems - a research direction anchored in rigorous optimization, strengthened by uncertainty modeling (stochastic, fuzzy, rough, and hybrid frameworks), and ultimately designed to deliver robust, explainable, and implementable decisions in real-world environments.
In short, OptimDSS was not created as a label. It emerged as a commitment:
to bridge elegant mathematical theory with messy practical reality - and to build a research ecosystem that turns uncertainty into structured, confident decision-making.