Humanitarian organizations (HOs) often base their warehouse locations on individuals' experience and knowledge rather than on decision-support tools. Many HOs run separate supply chains for emergency response and ongoing operations. Based on reviews of humanitarian network design literature combined with an in-depth case study of United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), this paper presents a warehouse location model for joint prepositioning that incorporates political and security situation factors. Although accessibility, co-location, security, and human resources are crucial to the practice of humanitarian operations management, such contextual factors have not been included in existing network optimization models before. We found that when quantified, and modeled, such factors are important determinants of network configuration. In addition, our results suggest that joint prepositioning for emergency response and ongoing operations allows for expansion of the global warehouse network, and reducing cost and response time.

The amount of text people need to read and understand grows daily. Software defaults, designers, or publishers often choose the fonts people read in. However, matching individuals with a faster font could help them cope with information overload. We collaborated with typographers to (1) select eight fonts designed for digital reading to systematically compare their efectiveness and to (2) understand how font and reader characteristics afect reading speed. We collected font preferences, reading speeds, and characteristics from 252 crowdsourced participants in a remote readability study. We use font and reader characteristics to train FontMART, a learning to rank model that automatically orders a set of eight fonts per participant by predicted reading speed. FontMART's fastest font prediction shows an average increase of 14-25 WPM compared to other font defaults, without hindering comprehension. This encouraging evidence provides motivation for adding our personalized font recommendation to future interactive systems.

No abstract

No abstract

No abstract