Pro Bono Analytics at the 2019 Annual Meeting in Seattle
INFORMS Pro Bono Analytics is partnered with Seattle-based nonprofit organization, FareStart, an organization providing people who are struggling with the skills they need to get a job in the field of food services and culinary arts, while also helping to provide necessities like clothing and food, to build hygiene kits and make “no-sew” blankets for homeless […]
Human Trafficking
By Amira Hijazi Human trafficking is defined as the exploitation of children, women, and men for sexual slavery, forced labor, and the extraction of organs or tissues. The International Labor Organization estimates that 40 million people were victims of modern slavery on any given day in 2016. Human trafficking has two major types: sex trafficking […]
Social Media Analytics: Contemporary Topics and Techniques
By Aida Rahmattalabi In the modern world, social media is becoming a powerful means of analyzing different user behaviors. In the session “Social Media Analytics: Contemporary Topics and Techniques,” three interesting talks summarized some of the recent results in this area. The first talk was concerned with brand personality and how it influences messages both […]
Online and Reinforcement Learning
By Aida Rahmattalabi The 2019 INFORMS Annual Meeting has come to an end with a series of exciting sessions on Wednesday. In particular, the session “Online and Reinforcement Learning,” hosted five interesting talks, discussing the challenging machine learning problems. If you are a machine learning researcher, you must have faced the following questions: “What learning […]
Keynote: People, Machines and Intelligence
By Violet Chen Back in the 1960s, Dr. J. C. R Licklider plotted a long-term dream of man-computer symbiosis, “people will set the goals, formulate the hypotheses, determine the criteria, and perform the evaluations. Computing machines will prepare the way for insights and decisions in technical and scientific thinking.” On Wednesday afternoon, in his keynote […]
Optimizing Public Policy
By Violet Chen There has been a rising interest in applying modelling and optimization tools to improve public policy design. The Wednesday morning session, “Optimizing Public Policy,” featured three interesting talks on this topic. Theodore Papalexopoulos, PhD student from the MIT Operations Research Center, talked about “Redistricting Liver Allocation: A Simulation-Optimization Approach.” The presented work […]
Keynote: Marketplace Modeling: Managing Scale and Accuracy
By Amira HijaziFacebook social good works on building powerful tools that improve people’s lives. Fundraiser matching, matching jobs and applicants, blood donation recommendations, friend suggestions, rendering feeds, and online advertising are some of the initiatives announced by Facebook social good. These initiatives have a widespread real-world impact. However, the output of these initiatives needs to […]
5 Core Virtues of Data Science and Artificial Intelligence
As Epictetus said, “One cannot learn what they think they already know.” So to both the human AND the machine, I submit that the following “5 Core Virtues in Data Science and Artificial Intelligence are as follows… meaning these are as much a consideration for how and why algorithms are done by a meaty brain […]
The Go-Giver
I have heard many INFORMS members ask questions like “how can I be more involved” and “How can serving in INFORMS make a difference in my career” and “How can my career become multi-dimensional?” Such a sincere question deserves a sincere answer and what follows is not meant to be short or cute or overly […]
Congrats to COIN-OR Cup Winners!
The COIN-OR Cup reception is held each year at a location in the INFORMS conference city that exudes local color. This year was no exception, as we met at Linda’s Tavern on Monday evening. The 15th COIN-OR Cup committee was headed by last year’s winners, Andreas Lundell and Jan Kronqvist. The cup was awarded to […]