About Me

Greetings! I am currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Industrial Systems Engineering and Management (ISEM), the Institute for Operations Research and Analytics (IORA) and the Artificial Intelligence Institute (NAII) at National University of Singapore (NUS).

Prior to joining NUS, I spent one year at Amazon SCOT as a postdoctoral scientist – here is the Amazon coverage of what I did. I obtained my PhD in Computational Science and Engineering and two master’s in EECS and Transportation from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and two bachelor’s in Industrial Engineering and Mathematics from Tsinghua University.

Selected Preprints and Working Papers

  • Lyu, H., Qin, H., Zheng, H.. On Fairness of Process Flexibility. (SSRN)
    • Second Place, POMS-HK Best Student Paper Competition (Entrant: Hongyao Lyu), 2026.
  • Liang, K., Lu, Y., Mao, J., Sun, S., Zeng, C., Jin, X., Qin, H., Zhu, R. and Teo, C.P.. LLM for Large-Scale Optimization Model Auto-Formulation: A Lightweight Few-Shot Learning Approach. (SSRN)
  • Qin, H., Simchi-Levi, D. and Zhu, R.. Sailing through the Dark: Provably Sample-Efficient Inventory Control. (SSRN)
    • Under revision at Management Science.
  • Li, Z., Zhang, X., Qin, H. and Chou, M.C.. Adaptive Online Resource Allocation Schemes under General Non-Stationary Arrivals. (SSRN)
    • Prelimnary version accepted at The 41st International Conference on Machine Learning. (ICML 2024)
  • Liu, J., Qin, H. and Chou, M.C.. Pricing Analytics with Shape-Restricted Demands. (SSRN)
  • Tan, Z., Yu, Y., Qin, H., Liu, L.. Beyond Traditional Transshipment: A Flexible Mechanism for Multi-Echelon Logistics System.
    • Under revision at Transportation Science.
  • Liu, W., Liu, X., Liu, M., Zhang, Z.H., Qin, H.. Tackling Decision Dependency in Contextual Stochastic Optimization.
    • Under revision at Production and Operations Management.
  • Hu, H., Qin, H. and Simchi-Levi, D.. Solving Large-Scale Vehicle Routing Problems with Unsplit Demands via Limited Information. (SSRN)

Selected Journal Publications

  • Fan, X., Chen, B., Olsen, T., Qin, H. and Zhou, Z.. Don’t Follow RL Blindly: Lower Sample Complexity of Learning Optimal Inventory Control Policies with Fixed Ordering Costs. (SSRN)
    • Accepted at Production and Operations Management.
  • Zhou, J., Zhang, Y., Qin, H., Wang, j., Xing, L., Wang, L.. Data-Driven Multiobjective Multimodal Transportation Route Optimization in Hybrid Uncertain Environments.
    • Accepted at IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems.
  • Qin, H., Simchi‐Levi, D., Ferer, R., Mays, J., Merriam, K., Forrester, M. and Hamrick, A., 2022. Trading safety stock for service response time in inventory positioning. Production and Operations Management, 31(12), pp.4462-4474. (Journal) (SSRN)
  • Ledvina, K., Qin, H., Simchi-Levi, D. and Wei, Y., 2022. A new approach for vehicle routing with stochastic demand: Combining route assignment with process flexibility. Operations Research, 70(5), pp.2655-2673. (Journal) (SSRN)
  • Qin, H., Simchi-Levi, D. and Wang, L., 2022. Data-driven approximation schemes for joint pricing and inventory control models. Management Science, 68(9), pp.6591-6609. (Journal) (SSRN)

PhD Thesis