INFORMS 2012 Annual Meeting in Phoenix, AZ
Oct. 14-17, 2012 the Informs 2012 Annual Meeting “Informatics Rising” was held in the convention center of Phoenix, AZ as well as the Grand Hyatt next door. 4,230 attendees were registered. No new record, but still a nice number... Again, analytics was an important theme at this event. Informs announced analytics certification at this event (CAP: Certified Analytics Professional). It will not test the more advanced predictive modeling content such as the one we offer in the Master of Science in Marketing Analysis or Marketing Engineering, but still it is expected to have a positive impact on the careers of people taking the test. The first test is scheduled for April 2013. In the picture above, the UGent modeling cluster delegation at this conference is shown. The convention center was a really nice venue (see picture below). The choices of specific sessions is of course a highly personal one, so I do not claim representativeness for the entire event.
Thursday 18 October 2012
Dauwe Vercamer (UGent Business Engineer, see picture below) presented his paper titled “A Divide-and-conquer Analysis of Very Large Asymmetric Vehicle Routing Problems” right on the first day. An impressive 30+ audience attended his talk. Due to the cancellation of the talk after his one, he was able to receive and answer lots of questions.
One of the big themes at the Informs 2012 Annual Meeting was again “Big Data”. Alan Gara (Intel Fellow and Director of Exascale Computing Pathfinding, Exascale Chief Architect, see picture below) talked about the computational challenges of the future. He reassured us that “Moore’s Law” is not dead. It’s alive and well. He went on to talk about the progress of using Silicon Photonics (see picture below) in microprocessors.
The program directors running analytics programs gathered for some interesting exchanges of opinions. In the picture below, you see Dr. Tom Bohannon’s (see picture below) talk about the SAS Academic program to support master programs in analytics. It is still reassuring to notice that UGent is still leading in this domain (MMA is the longest-running analytics program in the world, and at the same time the cheapest at 584 + 200 EUR for the entire 8-month program), but mainly on the quality dimension.
After that, the meeting of the Analytics Section of Informs took place. Professor Mike Gorman passed the presidency over to Zahir Balaporia (Director Intermodal Operations at Schneider National, see picture below).
Anne Robinson (Director supply chain strategy and analytics at Verizon Wireless, see picture below) emphasized Informs’ commitment to analytics (she has been elected next president of Informs).
In the analytics track, I particularly liked Mark Grabau’s (IBM, see picture below) presentation on “Insurance Agency Productivity, Efficiency and Prospecting”. He presented a solution to facilitate the decision-making process for managing the agency distribution channel for insurance such that it is productive and profitable. From a methodological point of view, his project combines DEA (Data Envelopment Analysis) with logistic regression (1: on efficient frontier, 0 otherwise).
After a luncheon with Dr. Christopher B. Lofgren’s (CEO of Schneider National, see picture below) I also attended his talk titled “Principles to successfully navigate the vortex of innovation.
That evening, it was time for the conference dinner (see pictures below).
On the last day, Jeroen D’Haen (Master of Science in Marketing Analysis graduate, class of 2011, see picture below) presented his talk titled “Using Web Data for Acquiring Profitable Customers”.
In the afternoon, Andrey Volkov (UGent Business Engineer, Class of 2011) presented the talk “Incorporating Predictors Based on Sequence Analysis Techniques in Bankruptcy Prediction Modeling” showing the use of Markov For Discrimination variables in credit scoring.
What I really appreciate about the INFORMS Annual Meetings is the high-quality tutorial sessions. This is a must for any serious high-quality conference. With 70+ sessions per time slot, one always finds an interesting session to attend. Congratulations to the organizers for perfectly managing this large number of talks. Moreover, it was refreshing to see that open source in the operations research community (COIN-OR) is alive and kicking. The Informs organization also discovered video testimonials/interviews at this conference (INFORMS TV, see picture of the “studio” during the conference below). In sum, an excellent conference... see you next year in Minneapolis.
