Media Coverage

Media articles featuring INFORMS members in the news.

Most Recent Media Coverage

Topic

How to Improve Decision Making in Supply Chains

December 23, 2015

David Simchi-Levi, MIT Professor, INFORMS Fellow and Former Editor-in-Chief of Operations Research (INFORMS Journal) 

The ability to understand a combination of historical behavior, market conditions and future needs drives decision making. New analytic capabilities that combine machine learning and optimization can take into account historical characteristics and competitor behavior to determine future demand that will allow optimization for the best results - such as profit, market share or revenue.

Examples of decisions where this approach can be used is assortment, pricing, sourcing strategies for new products, predictive maintenance using process sensors.

Portfolios and Their Debt to an O.R. Nobel Winner

December 18, 2015

During WWII, academics developed “Operations Research” techniques involving statistics and linear programming to hunt enemy submarines, supply troops on the ground and deliver ordnance to targets. Soon after the war ended, Operations Research academics began to apply their methodologies to investing. In 1952 Harry Markowitz, a graduate student at the University of Chicago, published a paper on portfolio selection in the Journal of Finance. Markowitz’s quantitative approach to investment theory was radically different from the conventional stock market wisdom at the time, which focused on picking winning stocks and concentrating stock holdings to maximize return. Investors knew that holding stocks meant taking risks, and they were led to believe that the only way to reduce risk was to become more competent at picking stocks. Some investors were following the advice of Gerald M. Loeb, the co-founder of brokerage firm E.F. Hutton, who wrote “once you obtain competency, diversification is undesirable.” Markowitz’s work along with others gave birth to what is now known as Modern Portfolio Theory (MPT). MPT provided investors quantitative ways to reduce risk and optimize their return.

INFORMS CAP Certification #1

December 17, 2015

While you’ll have to determine your own goals and certification needs, let’s look at a handful of important and valuable certifications all IT professionals should consider earning.

  1. Certified Analytics Professional

CAP certification enables you to understand the entire analytics process. From framing business and analytic problems to deployment and model lifecycle management, you’ll have full knowledge of everything that goes into general analytics by the time you finish this certification process.

Management Science Makes List of Top 25 STEM Majors

December 9, 2015

Finding the optimal way to use a workforce is not an art — it’s a science. In small groups a missing employee can cause sleepless nights when deadlines approach, while an extra employee can result in missed performance metrics. In large groups, such as Fortune 500 companies, these same problems can cost a company billions of dollars or result in thousands of lost jobs. Management science applies the principles of mathematics to the modern office to streamline processes, cut costs and grow revenue.

Social media as force multiplier

December 7, 2015

This notion of collaborative expertise makes me consider my own profession. I come from an Air Force community culturally dominated by Operations Research, a discipline “employing techniques from other mathematical sciences, such as mathematical modeling, statistical analysis, and mathematical optimization” to arrive “at optimal or near-optimal solutions to complex decision-making problems.” This is a relatively young and inherently cross disciplinary field, with all the depth-and-breadth-balance problems that entails, that grew out of efforts by scientists, mathematicians, computer scientists, etc., to solve operational problems in World War II. These were, however, experts (in some cases luminaries) in their respective fields, and together they were able to do incredible things that might have been impossible for any subset to accomplish on their own. Social networking is one way to access and connect that kind of expertise.

Media Contact

Ashley Smith
Public Affairs Coordinator
INFORMS
Catonsville, MD
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Resoundingly Human Podcast

An audio journey of how data and analytics save lives, save money and solve problems.

Artificial Intelligence

Healthcare

Experts' Insights About Understanding Health Care

Experts' Insights About Understanding Health Care

MoneyGeek, July 24, 2024

Health plans can help rural and underserved areas by giving people more coverage options. They can improve telehealth services to make it easier to receive care from afar and increase reimbursement rates for rural health care providers. To improve access and outcomes in rural areas, insurers can also support mobile and rural health clinics and offer rural-focused health plans.

Supply Chain

Climate