Conference Blog

The conference is coming to an end, which for me means it’s time to reflect upon what happened. The Good There were lots of good (and great) things happening. For starters, I loved the more expedited check-in process. One comment I heard repeatedly was “Even though the lines at first looked long, they moved really […]

There are a lot of optimizers at the INFORMS meeting, so I suppose it should not be surprising that difficult problems get solved here. Nonetheless, I have seen a few results I would not have anticipated. The shortest path problem is well known to be easy, but I thought the longest path problem was NP-hard(ish). […]

The student award reception had a special taste for me because the three winners of the Judith Liebman Award are friends that I have known for years and I witnessed their hard work towards this recognition. This is an award given to student volunteers that did excellent work on behalf of INFORMS student chapters and […]

It’s the last day of the conference, the day where often new members make their first INFORMS presentations. Many of us know someone whose training is not in ORMS per se, but whom we’d enjoy seeing at the conference because of their related work.  I decided to interview someone whom I have encouraged to attend […]

By Yeawon Yoo How many people used TSA PreCheck to come to the INFORMS Annual Meeting? On Tuesday morning, we learned how the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) implements passenger screening, in a plenary titled, “Adopting a Risk-Based Approach to Passenger Screening” and opened the third day of the Annual Meeting. Ali Abbas from the University […]

Today I decided to check out one of the Flash Sessions. Each participant had 6 minutes to present, followed by Q&A. I think this is a fantastic idea because it forces you to really focus on the main message and find ways to deliver a complicated message in a compact format. As I watched the […]

Premiered these insights and first principles on “Developing Robust Analytics Curricula” w/ colleagues from academia and industry during @INFORMS2018 General Session. Summarized as 4-3-2… 4 METHODS for delivery, 3 ways to demonstrate MINDFULNESS, and 2 skills to handle MINUTIAE. Looking to  “keep the model as simple as possible but no simpler” as I  refine and advance such a […]

Lo and behold, that session on robust optimization organized by Dan Iancu of Stanford University was very well attended, showing that early sessions on the right topic can attract good audiences, although I hope INFORMS never experiments with a 7am start. Best of all was that Dimitris Bertsimas himself showed up to listen and stayed […]

Daniel Freund, Shane Henderson, David B. Shmoys, Cornell University, & Eoin O’Mahony, Uber Technologies Inc., for their paper Analytics and Bikes: Riding Tandem with Motivate to improve Mobility. If you have ever rented a bike from Motivate you have benefited from the analytical work done by this team that improve the allocation of docks to […]

Thanks for everyone who came to the INFORMS official introduction of the INFORMS Analytics Body of Knowledge (INFORMS ABOK). The turnout was fantastic, and it was gratifying to see strong interest in this publication. I encourage you to stop by the Wiley booth in the exhibit hall today to take a look at the first edition of […]