Through the eyes of first-timers
I remember when the INFORMS Annual Meeting was last in Seattle in 2007, so this is not MY first time, but I am here with several colleagues who are first-timers. I attended my first annual meeting in a different role but didn’t attend another for a few years until I changed roles and past president […]
Keynote: Structured Optimization for Dexterous Robots
By Aida Rahmattalabi Russ Tedrake from MIT gave a keynote talk on “Structured Optimization for Dexterous Robots.” As the talk started, the crowd gradually gathered, and shortly after, the room was packed with enthusiastic listeners. Russ Tedrake introduced the shortcomings in the present robotics research and how he proposed to address them by “embracing learning […]
Humanitarian Analytics
By Violet Chen The technical session “Humanitarian Analytics” began on Sunday, October 20, at 11am. The session was chaired by Dr. Elisa Long, who is an Associate Professor of Decisions, Operations, and Technology Management at UCLA Anderson School of Management. The first talk was given by Elnaz Kabir, a PhD student in Industrial and Operations […]
Optimization-based Approaches to Housing Allocation
By Aida Rahmattalabi Sunday morning started with a series of great talks. The session “Optimization-based Approaches to Housing Allocation,” hosted four talks, each addressing the problem of housing allocation from a different angle. The first presentation was given by Sanmay Das, an associate professor in computer science and engineering at the University of Washington in […]
Plenary: Seeking Perfection: Reflections on the Journey
By Violet Chen In the morning of Sunday, October 20, INFORMS 2019 President Dr. Ramayya Krishnan opened the Welcome & Plenary session by welcoming everyone to Seattle. Dr. Krishnan shared the exciting news that INFORMS 2019 has a record breaking participation count of 7,200 registrants. He thanked the city of Seattle for hosting the OR/MS […]
Immigration Policy
By Amira Hijazi Available data regarding the flow of undocumented immigrants is subject to an extreme physical bias. To correct this bias, Dr. Edward Kaplan, William N. and Marie A. Beach Professor of Operations Research, Professor of Public Health & Professor of Engineering at Yale University, uses probability to model the migration flow of undocumented […]
Making the case for agriculture
There’s no question that data analytics and digital innovation are revolutionizing agriculture – driving such advancements as autonomous tractors and drones that monitor crop conditions. Even the seed that farmers plant is developed with the help of data analytics – and might very well represent the most complex input on a farm, given the vast […]
Women in OR/MS Events
It has been said many times already “The most favorite social event of the INFORMS Annual Conference is WORMS Networking Reception”. I am not saying this because last year I was one of the organizers and we received many complements, no, not at all, but because last year we expected 150 people showing up not […]
New Faculty Advice
At the New Faculty Colloquium there was a plethora of tips and great advice for people new to the tenure track faculty life. Here I will highlight some of the top tips I heard. If you are in a department that values grants then it is in your best interest to write 1-2 proposals in […]
COIN-OR at INFORMS Seattle
If you aren’t familiar with the COIN-OR project, it is an initiative to disseminate open-source software tools for the computational operations research community. The project started at IBM Research in 2000 and has been administered by an independent educational nonprofit foundation since 2004. We currently distribute about 70 individual projects, including general- and special-purpose solvers, […]