Uma Prabhu Centennial Conference

The School of Operations Research & Information Engineering hosted the Uma Prabhu Centennial Celebration September 13-14, 2024 on the Cornell Ithaca Campus, to celebrate the 100th anniversary of Uma Prabhu’s birth.
Uma Prabhu speaking at a microphone.

Professor Narahari Umanath (Uma) Prabhu passed away in October 2022 at the age of 98. During his long and distinguished career, much of which was spent at Cornell, Uma contributed tremendously to the fields of queueing theory and applied probability in general. He was also instrumental in the process of building the school into the powerhouse of both teaching and research it remains to this day.

Gennady Samorodnitsky, along with ORIE professors Jim Dai and David Goldberg, served as the organizing committee for the June 2024 Uma Prabhu Centennial Conference. The event felt in some ways like an extended family reunion, with some of Uma’s actual family joining many of his academic family for a series of talks, meals, and a reception, all with the guiding purpose of remembering and celebrating Uma Prabhu the man and Uma Prabhu the mathematician.

Videos of most of the talks delivered at the conference as well as some photos and short remembrances recorded at a closing dinner and reception.

Vas Prabhu’s Opening Remarks

You can watch Uma’s daughter Vas Prabhu deliver the opening remarks of this wonderful weekend event.

Group photo of participants at the 2024 Uma Prabhu Centennial Celebration

Invited Speakers and Talk Titles

  • Soren Asmussen, Aarhus University

    Lévy Processes, Markov-Modulation  and  Wiener-Hopf Factorization

  • Onno Boxma, Technical University Eindhoven

    Overlaps in Queues

  • Ton Dieker, Columbia University

    QPLEX: A Computational Modeling and Analysis Methodology for Stochastic Systems

  • Bharat Doshi, Johns Hopkins University

  • Michel Mandjes, University of Amsterdam

    Lévy driven queues: the workload correlation function is positive, decreasing and convex

  • Masakiyo Miyazawa, Tokyo University of Science

    Multi-level reflecting Brownian motion on the half line and its stationary distribution

  • Antonio Pacheco, Lisbon Institute of Science and Technology

  • Jamol Pender, Cornell University

    Epidemics in Queues

  • Vidayanathan Ramaswami, Statmetrics

    Spatial point processes

  • Sid Resnick, Cornell University

    Forms of Asymptotic Dependence in Heavy Tailed Data

  • Ziv Scully, Cornell University

    Strongly Tail-Optimal Scheduling in the Light-Tailed M/G/1

  • Amy Ward, University of Chicago

    Integrating Machine Learning and Queueing to Enhance Decision-Making:  An Application in Criminal Justice

The Uma Mix!! (A Sampling of Uma’s favorite music played prior to talk by his daughter Vasundhara Prabhu)

  • “Nadi” 10:35 Ravi Shankar with John Matarazzo, Varanasi Voyage
  • “Sakal Belar Aloye Baje” 3:40 Subhinoy Roy, Amar Apar Gaan Songs of Rabindranath
  • “Raga Piloo” 14:44 Ravi Shankar and Yehudi Menhuin; West Meets East; United Nations Human Rights Day (12.10.1967)
  • “Oder Saathe Mela Jara” 3:10 Amar Apar Gaan-Songs of Rabindranath
  • “Brahmacharya” 10:00 Ravi Shankar with John Matarazzo, Varnasi Voyage

Uma’s Sources of Happiness

This handout was distributed at the 2024 event and draws from autobiographical notes Uma wrote.