Upcoming Seminars

Abstract: Bail funds have a long history of helping those who cannot afford bail in order to wait for trial at home.  It is well known that bail funds can have a large impact on the verdict of the defendant and the quality of their life in the future.  In this talk, we will present some simple stochastic models for capturing the dynamics of the remaining money in a community bail fund and how this money should be allocated to defendants.  The bail fund models presented will integrate traditional queueing models with classic insurance/risk models.  We will show how to construct more complicated models from applying the Skorokhod map to simpler models.  Finally, we will address the complexity in modeling human behavior and how it is valuable to talk to non-mathematicians in order to improve the underlying mathematics and understanding.   

Bio: Jamol Pender is an Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in the School of Operations Research and Information Engineering at Cornell University.  He received his Ph.D. from Princeton University in 2013 where he was advised by Dr. William Massey.  He joined Cornell University in 2015, and serves as a Faculty Fellow in the Residence Halls at Cornell.  Jamol is a recipient of a Ford Foundation Fellowship, the NSF CAREER award, MIF Career Award, and several teaching and advising awards, including the Sonny Yau award for teaching excellence, the Zellman Warhaft Commitment to Diversity Award and the EPICC award for community building.  Jamol's research focuses on how to disseminate information to customers in queues and how this information affects the underlying dynamics in queues.  He is very interested in the interplay between stochastic processes, simulation, and non-linear dynamics.  Jamol is heavily involved in the Applied Probability Society of INFORMS, where he served as the INFORMS APS 2019 conference co-chair.