Operations Research Speaks: From Human Trafficking to Distracted Driving to Wildfire Fuel Management and More!

Operations Research has had many successes from methodological advances to important applications and the solution of numerous relevant problems in areas as diverse as transportation and logistics to health care and even blood supply chains.

This semester we are very lucky to have a fantastic lineup of speakers in our UMass Amherst INFORMS Speaker Series which the UMass Amherst INFORMS Student Chapter helps me to organize.

This Friday, October 13, 2017 we are hosting Dr. Renata Konrad from the Foisie School of Business at WPI in Massachusetts. Dr. Konrad will be speaking on human trafficking and how operations research and analytics can help in combating it.  Dr. Konrad I know through WORMS (Women in Operations Research and the Management Sciences), since she is this INFORMS forum's past President.  Also, Renata and I share a cultural heritage in that she was born in Canada and we both speak Ukrainian.

Renata and I were among the invited participants to a workshop sponsored by the National Science Foundation on Disrupting Illicit Supply Chains, which took place last May at the University of Texas Austin and a followup workshop will be taking place in Arlington, VA in early December.

Then, on Friday, October 20, 2017, the chapter will be continuing its annual tradition of hosting a tune-up for the annual INFORMS conference, which this year is taking place in Houston, Texas, October 22-25. Given the horrific impact of Hurricane Harvey there it will be a memorable experience, I am sure. In this year's tune-up there are 5 doctoral student speakers who will be presenting the papers that they will also be giving in Houston. It's a wonderful way in which to share research and to get positive feedback on presentation skills. The breadth of topics illustrates the wide reach of Operations Research! The doctoral students who are presenting are from the Isenberg School of Management (and are in the Management Science PhD track) and the College of Engineering (Industrial Engineering). Two of my doctoral students, Deniz Besik (the current chapter president) and Pritha Dutta (the immediately preceding chapter President), will be speaking. Also, presenting are doctoral students of Professor Erin Baker and Professor Chaitra Gopalappa.

It will be a very exciting INFORMS Houston conference, since our student chapter, which I have served as a Faculty Advisor of since its inception in 2004, will be receiving its 12th consecutive award from INFORMS there - the Magna Cum Laude Award for its activities in the previous year!

And, the Friday after the INFORMS Houston conference, we will be hosting Dr. Shannon Roberts of the Department of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering at UMass Amherst. She will be speaking on driving safety and social networks - another extremely timely talk!

On November 3, I am delighted that Professor Dmytro Matsypura of the University of Sydney School of Business in beautiful Australia will be speaking in our series at the Isenberg School!  Dr. Matsypura was my PhD student and is also a Center Associate of the Supernetwork Center that I founded in 2001. He is on sabbatical this term and will be speaking on wildfire fuel management. Given the horrific fires now blanketing northern California, this is also a talk not to be missed!

Many thanks to the wonderful officers of the award-winning UMass Amherst INFORMS Student Chapter as well as to its members for enriching the intellectual climate of our campus and broader community through  myriad exciting activities!

All of the above talks are open to the public.

Celebrating a Great Year for the UMass Amherst INFORMS Student Chapter

This past Friday, we celebrated the end of the semester and the end of the academic year with our UMass Amherst INFORMS Student Chapter party.

The officers and members have done an outstanding job this year bringing speakers, two from Europe, from both academia and industry, to share with us the latest on the challenges in the electric power industry, disaster management, healthcare and electronic records, cybersecurity workforce optimization as well as community-based operations research. In addition, the students, who come primarily from our doctoral program in Management Science at the Isenberg School of Management as well as the Department of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering in the UMass Amherst College of Engineering, also organized several social events.

This has been such a great year - and as the chapter's Faculty Advisor since 2004 I can attest to that - that we needed a special celebration at our party.

To honor this year's chapter officers whose esprit de corp, positive energy, innovations, plus logistics knowhow, which allows for such great parties (but, then again, these are operations research and management science students who practice what they preach), I presented the officers with a special award. Last Fall the chapter was honored with the Summa Cum Laude Award from INFORMS another truly memorable accolade.

Below is a photo of the group of officers with their award plaques, to which I also attached personal notes of appreciation for their hard work.

The cuisine at the party included pizza, fresh fruit, chicken wings, Ukrainian food, Indian food, many salads, and healthy sandwiches, and, of course, numerous delicious desserts. Faculty came from the Isenberg School as well as from Engineering even though the party began with a thunderstorm and lots of rain. Last year's chapter President, Michael Prokle, who received the Judith B. Liebman Awad from INFORMS at our annual conference in Philadelphia last Fall, traveled from Boston to the party.

The party began about 4:30PM and ended close to 7PM. There was a lot of laughter and great conversations and it is so rewarding to see everyone having such a great time and supporting one another. The friendships continue after the students receive their PhDs and graduate from UMass Amherst. Even undergraduates enjoy the event and one of my students, who successfully defended his undergraduate honors thesis in humanitarian logistics earlier that day, Emilio Alvarez Flores, also made it to the festivities and enjoyed talking with graduate students and faculty.

Thanks to all the faculty and students who came. The energy and enthusiasm are fabulous.

 

Clearly, given that next week is the last week of the semester we are all so busy but building our great community is very meaningful.

Below are photos of several of the individual award recipients.

The full roster of officers is recognized below.

 And one of my favorite photos is the one below, which truly captures the spirit of this great group!

Looking forward to another great academic year next year.

Best of luck to all those who are graduating - the class of 2016!

Thanks to Professor Tilman Wolf for a Great Talk on An Economy Plane for the Internet

This week was the last week of the Fall 2014 Fall semester and yesterday we hosted two great events: a seminar by Professor Tilman Wolf, who flew back from a conference in Paris (he had left on Monday afternoon) to speak in our UMass Amherst INFORMS Speaker Series followed by, shortly thereafter, our end of the semester party!

Professor Wolf is an Associate Dean at the College of Engineering at UMass Amherst and is a Professor in its Department of Computer and Electrical Engineering. He has received many awards for his research on networking.

I first treated Professor Wolf, along with a group of doctoral students,  to lunch at the University Club, and we had such a great time talking and laughing that we were late for the reception prior to his talk, which began at 2PM.

Tilman is the PI on our big NSF Future Internet Architecture project: Network Innovation Through Choice,  that I am a Co-PI on and that two of my doctoral students, Sara Saberi and Dong "Michelle" Li, have received support from.

We were all very much looking forward to his talk, "An Economy Plane for the Internet." Frankly, since I have hosted probably about 100 speakers in the series that the students of the UMass Amherst INFORMS Student Chapter help me to organize,  I was a bit worried that he might not make it back in time from Europe so it was a big relief when I reached him yesterday morning.

His presentation attracted faculty, staff, as well as students from both the Isenberg School of Management and the College of Engineering as well as from the Office of Information Technologies at UMass. We had advertised the talk widely through our e-lists, the Isenberg School website as well as the UMass Amherst events webpage.

Michael Prokle, the President of the UMass Amherst INFORMS Student Chapter, assisting me with the Introduction

His talk  provided an outstanding motivation and overview of why ChoiceNet, which is the architecture that we are developing, will lead to greater innovation of the Internet in terms of network services. He presented multicasting and why multicasting has not been as successful as had been originally theorized that it would be. He described the principles of ChoiceNet, which I have blogged about. It was thrilling for the doctoral students who have worked with us to see their papers and names in his presentation!  He emphasized how ChoiceNet would offer more choices in terms of duration-based contracts and even, if desired by consumers, enhanced cybersecurity, which I am also very interested in.

His presentation generated many excellent questions, always the signature of a great talk!

 He has kindly provided us with his presentation, which has been posted here.

We thank Professor Wolf for taking time out of his exceptionally busy schedule for giving us such an outstanding seminar presentation!

Some of the audience members with Professor Wolf after his presentation

A Walk Down Memory Lane - Celebrating 10 Years of the UMass Amherst INFORMS Student Chapter

We are very excited that this Friday, October 3, 2014, we will be celebrating the 10th anniversary of the award-winning UMass Amherst INFORMS Student Chapter.

The students in Operations Research and the Management Sciences prepared the lovely flyer below.

The celebration will take place in the Isenberg School of Management in Room 210 from 4:30-6:30.

It's been such a great honor to have served as this chapter's Faculty Advisor for the past decade and,  this morning, the newly elected President of the student chapter, Michael Prokle, surprised me with a video that was prepared by Ekin Koker, also a newly elected officer - Chapter Webmaster

When I viewed the video below prior to teaching my class this morning I was swept over by nostalgia - the photos in the video over a decade of student activities, numerous guest speakers - you may have fun identifying such luminaries as Dietrich Braess of Braess paradox fame, OR/MS superstars such as Dr. Cynthia Barnhart of MIT, Dr. Ed Kaplan of Yale, and Dr. Les Servi, of MITRE, to name only 3 that we have hosted through the chapter at the Isenberg School.


At the celebration on Friday, there will also be several video testimonials from previous Chapter Officers, some of whom are already tenured Associate Professors, and the first Chapter President, Dr. Tina Wakolbinger, who is now a Full Professor.

Enjoy strolling down Memory Lane, as much as I did and thanks for such an amazing decade!!!

UMass Amherst INFORMS Student Chapter Presents Panel on Teaching

This semester I have been very busy teaching my course on Humanitarian Logistics and Healthcare and a Management Science seminar on Variational Inequalities, Networks, and Game Theory. Both of these courses are interdisciplinary with students from the Isenberg School of Management, the College of Engineering, the School of Public Health, and the Computer Science Department.

In a recent exchange with the President and CEO of the America Red Cross, Ms. Gail McGovern (we were communicating about the great guest lecture of Mr. Rick Lee in my course), she said many things that resonated with me but the below was especially beautiful:

Having come straight from teaching MBAs to the Red Cross, I know firsthand that yours is such a noble profession.  I still keep in touch with many of my students, and I'm proud of  every one of their accomplishments.  It's truly the gift that keeps on giving.

How very  true!

And, this Friday, our great UMass Amherst INFORMS Student Chapter will be hosting a special panel on teaching in which our very own PhD students in Management Science will be sharing their experiences with a lot of exciting Q&A and discussions I am sure.

Refreshments are at 11:00AM with the panel and discussion from 11:30-12:30 in Isenberg Room 128.

Please join us if you can.

The students  prepared the poster below. In this day and age, we need to all also be graphic artists.

 Some very valuable teaching also takes place outside of the classroom!

The Value of Q&A Sessions with Top Operations Researchers from Industry

Last Friday, we had the pleasure and honor of hosting Dr. Mary E. Helander of IBM Yorktown Heights at the Isenberg School of Management through our UMass Amherst INFORMS Student Chapter. I help the students to organize chapter activities and since Dr. Helander wanted to visit us, we decided to do something a bit different. The event was so successful that one of the students present said afterwards: "Professor Nagurney we have to have more of these Q&A sessions!"

 

Amazingly, it was almost entirely a female audience!

Dr. Helander told the students that they could ask her ANY question.

First, some background on Dr. Helander. She is on the program committee of the INFORMS Conference on Business Analytics and Operations Research that will take place in Boston next spring. She is a Master Inventor and Research Scientist and is currently the IBM Research Division leader for Consumer Products. Presently, she is the technical lead for two interdisciplinary research projects involving food safety and traceability.  Not only does she hold a PhD in Operations Research but she is also a Docent in Quality and Software Engineering from Linkoping University in Sweden. At lunch she and I talked about living in Sweden and she told me some mesmerizing stories about her surname -- I'll let you do the research -- another movie should be made.

Plus, Mary was part of one of the 2013 Edelman Award finalists:

McKesson: A Holistic Supply Chain Management Solution

Presented by:
Don Walker, McKesson; Kaan Katircioglu, IBM Research; Bob Gooby, McKesson
Authors:
McKesson Corporation: Robert Gooby, Nathan Mott, David Wagnon, Graeme Case, Matt Johnson
IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center: Kaan Katircioglu, Pawan Chowdhary, Youssef Drissi, Mary Helander, Karthik Sourirajan, Lin Li, Karthik Subbian
IBM Global Business Services: James Kalina, Howard Smith
IBM Japan: Takashi Yonezawa.

The Edelman Award is like an Academy Award for analytics and operations research, so although her team did not win to be a finalist is a huge achievement!

From Mary we learned a lot about IBM, and about her research and contributions there. We learned about functional foods and microtoxins and my favorite takeaway and quote from the Q&A session.

Mary said: People that you work with will bring you joy.

Frankly, I think that it is Dr. Mary Helander who is making such a positive impact on all those around her and beyond through her great operations research contributions and dynamic personality, which the students really appreciated!

Thank you so much, Dr. Mary Helander, for coming to the Isenberg School at UMass Amherst!

You are an operations research rockstar!

What an Amazing Week - It's All About Our Students!

Anyone who thinks that professors have a life of routine and their weeks are just punctuated by the classes that they teach are completely wrong.

If you like a predictable routine each day then being an academic is certainly not for you.

On the other hand, those of you who crave novelty, excitement, interactions with fascinating people, the exchange of new ideas as well as dynamism and being surrounded by energy and activity, then being an educator and a college professor is a dream job.

What makes being a college professor so special is the students and all that we do is really for the students!

This week is one of those weeks that highlights the span of activities that a fculty member is engaged in so let me tell you what we have been up to.

On Monday, I was videotaped by a UMass Amherst undergrad who is a member of the Isenberg School of Management Marketing Club for an Isenberg Youtube series that the club started on Meet the Professors. The students are editing my interview and it will be posted soon. I got to hear about the student's major and we reminisced about New Jersey, where he is from. The extracurricular activities that our students are engaged in are diverse and they acquire numerous skills through them.

Then,  after meetings with advisees and doctoral students, it was time to march across campus for a search committee meeting. I am serving, with my great colleagues in Mechanical and Industrial Engineering, on a faculty search for an Assistant Professor in Systems Engineering. We went over the piles of applications and reached a consensus as to the top candidates, which was gratifying. There are fabulous PhD students out there. We will be very busy with their visits and interviews in the coming weeks. And if you want to see how in demand systems engineering expertise is just read about UTC's gift of $10 million to UConn to create an institute with faculty positions.

On Tuesday, I taught my OIM413 Logistics and Transportation class, which I love teaching and will soon be teaching a class today, as well. The students are now identifying the topics that they will be doing their project papers on. These will be individual projects, rather than team projects, due to the late Thanksgiving this year and only one week of classes afterwards. I worked on a rubric (never had one of these in my Brown University days) to help them with their papers. Then, after more meetings it was time for our "weekly" National Science Foundation (NSF) project teleconference. Our project: Network Innovation Through Choice is one of 5 Future Internet Architecture projects selected by NSF. Our project team, consisting of  Professor Tilman Wolf of the College of Engineering, me, and our doctoral students, with Professors Ken Calvert and Jim Griffoen of the U. of Kentucky, Professors Rudra Dutta and Georre Rouskas of NCState, and Dr. Ilia Baldine of the Renaissance Institute at UNC, and their students, is working on a new Internet. We discussed the recent Principal Investigators Meeting that took place in San Diego and you can view the presentations (ours was given by Dr. Dutta)  here.

Then it was time to complete my talk for the TEDx UMassAmherst Professor Speaker Showcase, which takes place next Monday, November 25, in ISOM's Flavin Room. Students had nominated me for this special event and I am so honored and excited to be part of it. On Tuesday, some students had made an elaborate colorful announcement in chalk in my classroom, which was such a surprise -- I was redder than the bright red jacket I wore that day!

On Wednesday, I received a wonderful message from the Founding Editor of the Goteborg Daily, which is an English language newspaper published in Sweden's second largest city, sometimes also spelled and pronounced as "Gothenburg." My interview was published with photos and it brought back so many memories. Many nice messages followed from colleagues and students in Sweden, Austria, and the U.S. (and even from a few thoughtful top administrators) who had seen the article -- Thanks for the support!

My TEDx talk "completed," I met with several of the organizers of this event -- the students are so creative and their attention to detail is impressive -- there will be a red carpet, a spotlight, and even music provided by a group from the Berklee College of Music in Boston! We went through my talk and discussed the background, etc. Plus, I was videotaped also for this event. As one of my doctoral students said, "You always have to look fresh, Professor!"

Then it was time to discuss another pending project with fellow faculty and when I arrived home, after also meeting with a student about her doctoral dissertation proposal, I found in my mailbox a new book that I will be blogging about -- will keep you in suspense as the TEDx folks are doing in announcing one professor speaker each day before next Monday's gala event!

Plus, I heard wonderful news from a student in Vienna, Austria, who had taken my Humanitarian Logistics and Healthcare intensive short course that I taught at the Vienna University of Economics and Business last March (while on sabbatical in Europe).  He had been accepted into its doctoral program to work under my former doctoral student, Tina Wakolbinger, who is now a Full Professor there -- I had written him a letter of recommendation -- so happy about this great outcome!

Today, Thursday, after teaching my class, I will be getting ready for two big events tomorrow. I am serving as a co-supervisor of a doctoral dissertation at the School of Business, Economics and Law at the University of Gothenburg, and, tomorrow, Friday, the student, Niklas Arvidsson, will be defending his dissertation. I will be Skying in early in the morning for the defense. I have been very much enjoying reading his dissertation and attended his Kappa when I was in Gothenburg. The dissertation includes 5 papers that he has published on the overall theme of sustainable freight, which I am very interested in.

After Niklas' defense I will be off to support the students of the award-winning UMass Amherst INFORMS Student Chapter, since we are hosting Master Inventor Dr. Mary Helander of IBM with a reception at 10:30AM in the Isenberg School followed by a one hour Q&A. Then Mary and I will go out to lunch. She has a PhD from Sweden so her visit will be quite special for all of us!

Hosting Master Inventor Dr. Mary Helander of IBM

Mark your calendars! On Friday, November 22, the UMass Amherst INFORMS Student Chapter and I will be hosting IBM Master Inventor Dr. Mary E. Helander. According to Wikipedia: An IBM Master Inventor is an individual selected by IBM. The qualification and appointment to Master Inventor is governed by the value to IBM of an inventor's contribution to the patent portfolio, and through defensive publication (published in www.ip.com). IBM weighs many aspects of an inventor's contributions, including but not limited to impact of invention through licensing, inclusion in product, and percentage of patents with a measurable impact. IBM also considers an individual's contribution to the inventing community inside IBM, whether by acting as a patent reviewer, or providing feedback and guidance to new inventors.

Dr. Helander will be welcomed with a reception in Isenberg School Room 206 beginning at 10:30AM and the Q&A will follow at 11:00AM until noon.

I met Dr. Helander at an INFORMS Conference in Puerto Rico  and,  a few years back, in the Fall of 2009, she visited us and spoke at the Isenberg School on Food Safety in a Global Supply Chain.  
I wrote about her previous visit on this blog.

I would also like to take this opportunity to congratulate Dr. Helander on her receipt of the 2013 Minerva Award from SUNY Potsdam!

A Brilliant Talk on Social Media Analytics + Sports by Dr. Les Servi of Mitre

Yesterday, at the Isenberg School of Management, we had the distinct pleasure of hosting Dr. Les Servi of MITRE, who is an INFORMS Fellow (and whom I have known since our days at Brown University as undergraduate students). Dr. Servi delivered a brilliant talk on his latest research on the topic: Analyzing Social Media Data Having Discontinuous Underlying Dynamics.

Dr. Servi's presentation was part of the UMass Amherst INFORMS Speakers Series, which the Student Chapter helps me to organize and to host.

His talk was on his paper in Operations Research Letters, just hot off the press, and published in the November issue.

The paper begins with the statement, which immediately captures your interest (as did his talk): Although physical objects follow well understood Newtonian physics and are free of discontinuous dynamics, emotional intensity dynamics evolve continuously with unknown dynamics until a tipping point or external event triggers a discontinuity. 

In his presentation, Dr. Servi asked whether anger has dynamics (the same about sadness and positive emotions). Is there a formula that can capture the anger of citizens and is there a  momentum associated with anger? He concluded that sadness (and other emotions) follow dynamics that are different from those of rockets since there are discontinuities. His paper not only presents a model for a more nuanced dynamic for emotions but also a dynamic programming  algorithm to solve the associated optimization problem that identifies times of emotional discontinuities. He then illustrated the new method for the  analysis of mood shifts reflected in 380,000 Twitter messages related to one of the world’s most popular soccer teams, Manchester United, during their 2011–12 season.  He was impressed that so many in the audience at the Isenberg School knew of this team and its sport (a finance audience at a talk he gave in Boston did not recognize the team).

And what Dr. Servi discovered through analyzing the data was fascinating and not what one would expect immediately. The figure below displays the Mood Shift Analysis of the Twitter messages showing a breakpoint on 2/6/2012 and 5/14/2012.

The discontinuities in mood associated with certain dates were not due to wins or losses of one of the world's most popular sport franchises (and one student in the audience had been to Manchester games) but one marked the anniversary of the following event: the tipping point found on February 6, 2012, might be due, according to Dr. Servi,  to it being the 54th anniversary of an airplane crash in Munich which killed 8 Manchester United players and 3 staff and injured 9 other players as well as the team manager. Among serious Manchester United fans this event and date are well known despite it happening so long ago.

 

With a great talk such as this, our minds just percolated with ideas and questions. I asked whether MITRE had applied for a patent since the possible applications from finance to politics were simply stunning and the answer was ,"Yes," --  see here.   One of my colleagues, Dr. Ryan Wright,  asked a question about acceleration, which I thought was really interesting -- for example, could the model and algorithm track herding/crowding behavior? Dr. Rod Warnick of our great Hospitality and Tourism Management Department also asked a great question about seasonality with reference to Google as did several of the students. My colleague, Dr. Senay Solak, continued the conversations.


The discussions lasted as time just flew by until close to 4 o'clock and I think the students from the Isenberg School and the College of Engineering that came as well as the faculty will never forget this talk. We thank Dr. Les Servi for the clarity and brilliance of his talk! The previous time that Dr. Servi spoke in our series was in the Fall of 2006 when he talked about tracking pirates (and that was even before such activities hit the news).

 

Special thanks also to Dr. Bruce Weinberg, the Chair of the Marketing Department at the Isenberg School, and a social media star,  and to Dr. Weibo Gong of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at UMass Amherst, whose PhD advisor at Harvard University was Professor Larry Ho (also Servi's advisor), who joined Dr. Servi and me for lunch at the University Club.

After lunch, Dr. Servi and many others joined us in a celebration of the  3 awards that we received at the INFORMS conference in Minneapolis. The cake was delicious and the company simply wonderful with even Dr. Amir Masoumi joining us from Manhattan College.

 

What a great time to be an Operations Researcher living in an era with a proliferation of data. What information will the data reveal and what new discoveries?! And as Dr. Les Servi said, Philip Morse, a pioneer of Operations Research, would be very pleased.
 

Strength Through Professional Society Communities and Continuing Education

Everyone wants to and needs to be part of something bigger and to feel productive and be a recognized as a valuable contributor to an important organization.

When you wake up each morning, is it with a smile on your face and excitement, energy, and enthusiasm for the day and your projects? 

We are part of communities -- from the colleges and universities that we, as academics, teach and conduct research at to the companies that the practitioners and leaders in our profession in industries as varied as healthcare to transportation and logistics to financial services and high tech and consulting (to name just a few) contribute significantly to.

We are also, many of us, members of professional societies, which provide us with essential communities and from which we gain strength in so many ways.

With possible challenges in our immediate academic and corporate organizations due to continuing change, economic pressures, fluctuating perspectives in terms of  administration, and even our own values and dreams, professional societies can provide sustenance and support for our entire professional lives.

In addition to the camaraderie and networking opportunities, professional societies provide avenues for continuing education and personal and professional growth.

INFORMS, as the leading association for professional in analytics, operations research and management science, for example, has a plethora of communities that one can be part of, at different stages of one's careers:

From student chapters at various universities:

     End of the semester party of the UMass Amherst INFORMS Student Chapter

to INFORMS regional chapters:

Trip with some of my students to the INFORMS Boston Chapter Meeting, Burlington, MA, November 23, 2010 - Link to my presentation


to societies within INFORMS:

Transportation & Logistics Society of INFORMS -- several Robert Herman Lifetime Achievement Award recipients

to fora, such as WORMS (Women in Operations Research and the Management Sciences):
 

Various WORMS activities at the Annual INFORMS Meetings

one receives continuing education in many forms -- information and knowledge from conversations with colleagues and from lectures and talks with additional resources provided by INFORMS such as podcasts and now even INFORMS TV!

And, of course, we gain and learn so much through the wonderful conferences:

from regional ones:

2011 Northeast INFORMS Regional Conference
UMass Amherst, May 6-7, 2011

to the annual national ones, which serve as reunions for many of us, as well as international ones, which take us to exotic locales:

ALIO-INFORMS Joint International Meeting
Buenos Aires, Argentina, June 2010

Moreover, through INFORMS membership, one can find out about new jobs and opportunities -- terrific for students and for those seeking greener pastures or just new challenges.


Finally, with INFORMS' new CAP (Certified Analytics Professional) program you can gain valuable new credentialing. And, one of the first to take the CAP exam, Dr. Irv Lustig of IBM, explains the benefits of this exam in his interview with Barry List, the Communications Director of INFORMS in the video below.




Irv, by the way, was an undergraduate at Brown University, when I was a PhD student there, and I was his TA for Professor Stella Dafermos' OR course (she was my advisor). Needless to say, Irv was very smart and went on to Stanford to get his PhD in OR with Professor George Dantzig, as his advisor.

And, in closure, I emphasize that learning and gaining strength from our professional society communities can also be a lot of fun!