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 Anne Robinson got me involved, as I described in this OR/MS Today article. Now we are working together at Kinaxis, a supply chain planning software company based in Ottawa, Canada, and we brought five of our colleagues to join us for their first time. One presented today – Chantal Bisson-Krol (Director of Machine Learning) on “Interpretable AutoML for Mission Critical Supply Chain Planning” in SD08. Our co-founder, Duncan Klett, presents tomorrow, on “Using AI/ML to deliver a smarter supply chain” in MD73. A third, Arif Mohammed, has an MS in OR from Georgia Tech but never made it to an INFORMS event before. Two more have career paths that might not have as naturally taken them down an INFORMS path.
INFORMS has been a great professional home for me for many years, so I am excited to bring new folks into the fold. I’ve learned about new topics from many sessions attended; practiced collaboration, teamwork, and leadership in the activities in which I’ve become involved, and built a great network of professional colleagues and friends I can call upon. I appreciate the perspective of Michael Rappa, director of the Institute for Advanced Analytics, who has gotten his students memberships in INFORMS, because he tells them that part of being a professional is to be a member of a professional society. I want these same benefits for my colleagues, so I’m always trying to get more people involved.
The annual meeting is a big event if you’ve never attended anything like it before, so we are trying to guide our colleagues to sessions that might be helpful. It can certainly be overwhelming to choose among nearly 100 concurrent sessions, especially if you are a practitioner and less familiar with the nomenclature. If this isn’t your first time around, keep an eye out for those for whom it is and offer a little guidance along the way. Each one teach one, and we will continue to grow our membership with new and diverse voices.