Disaster Preparedness and Response through Optimization
By Violet Chen Monday started with a diverse line up of talks, including the session “Disaster Preparedness and Response through Optimization,” chaired by Dr. Joseph Szmerekovsky, Professor of Transportation and Logistics at North Dakota State University. Dr. Shaolong Hu from Texas State University opened up this session with his joint work with Dr. Zhijie Dong […]
Healthcare research is finally mainstream
After introducing Linda Green for her keynote speech today “The New Age of Healthcare Delivery”, I couldn’t help but reflect on a long way that healthcare research has come since 20 years ago. We now have Health Applications Society within INFORMS. We have Healthcare Department in Management Science. We have numerous Healthcare tracks at INFORMS […]
Microvolunteering Fun
This year, INFORMS (and Pro Bono Analytics) are partnering with FareStart, a Seattle nonprofit helping the homeless learn the skills necessary to find employment in the restaurant and food service sectors. Yesterday (Sunday), conference attendees helped create “hygiene kits” for FareStart to distribute. Today and for the remainder of the meeting (“while supplies last”, as […]
The Enduring Value of the INFORMS Conference
One of the promises of the Internet is that we would all be able to work wherever we wanted with no loss of productivity. Talent could be found wherever it lived, whether across the world or a small town hundreds of miles away from the large city where venture capitalists or the Fortune 500 company […]
A Word Cloud to Remember Shabbir Ahmed
The optimization community had some big losses this year with the passing of giants such as Shabbir Ahmed and Egon Balas. I only met Shabbir in person in some of the conferences that I attended during my doctoral years. I still remember how much time he spent talking to me the first time that I […]
In our workism lives, long acquaintances are more…
We INFORMS people are a serious bunch, much of the time. We wear serious glasses and even walk a certain way. I am confident that I could reliably pick INFORMS people out of line ups. After coming to INFORMS for many years, I feel a bit less jealous and insecure. I also feel a real […]
The INFORMS “masses” want…interpretable AI
Many of us think about what the prestige journals want (possibly more than what makes sense). For me, it is a bit new to think about topic selection to increase presentation attendance, even though I have been a cluster chair for three years in Social Media Analytics. (I am warming up to the job.) Personally, […]
I want to start INFORMS over again
There are two ways to start over: 1. Go back in time 15+ years ago when I came to INFORMS for the 1st time, and 2. Become 15 years younger today. I choose the 2nd option. I can’t remember if 15 years ago we at INFORMS had all the networking opportunities that today’s members have. […]
Energy Access, Equity, and Fairness
The Talks are off and running at INFORMS! I love that at this conference you can explore almost any application area. My Sunday was spent exploring topics of energy modeling for social good. In the “SB86 Modeling for Electricity Access” session led by Juan Pablo Carvallo there were 5 talks on modeling the electricity expansion […]
2019 INFORMS Awards Ceremony
By Amira Hijazi “It has been quite a night to remember!” quoting Prof. Dimitris Bertsimas, the recipient of the Informs President’s Award and the John von Neumann Theory Prize along with Dr. Jong-Shi Pang, at the awards ceremony last night. Prof Bertsimas’s research is sustained, multidimensional, and highly impactful. On behalf of all of us […]