The application of stochastic heuristic, like tabu search or simulated annealing, to address hard discrete optimization problems has been an important advance for efficiently obtaining good solutions in a reasonable amount of computing time. A challenge when applying such heuristics is assessing...

The National Collegiate Athletic Association׳s (NCAA) men׳s Division I college basketball tournament is an annual competition that draws widespread attention in the United States. Predicting the winner of each game is a popular activity undertaken by numerous websites, fans, and more recently,...

Combination vaccines have become the preferred choice for immunizing children in high- and middle-income countries. However, these new vaccines are prohibitively expensive for low-income countries, causing them to rely on older, less-expensive vaccines. This product divergence decreases...

Bracketology, the art of successfully picking all the winners in the National Collegiate Athletic Association's (NCAA) annual men's Division I college basketball championship tournament, has become a favorite national activity. In spite of the challenges and uncertainty faced in this endeavor,...

Vaccination against infectious disease is an extremely important public health endeavor. Yet, in the past 40 years, the manufacture of pediatric vaccines has become less profitable due to rising costs and limited demand, inducing many pharmaceutical companies to leave the market. To ensure the...