Exciting updates (and more to come!) from the 2023 INFORMS President

With 2023 well underway, it’s time to circle back and check in with the INFORMS president, Laura Albert, professor and department chair of Industrial and Systems Engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Madison for an update on the latest and greatest at INFORMS. Laura, thank you so much for joining me.

Laura Albert:

It’s a pleasure to be here.

Ashley Kilgore:

So we recently returned from the INFORMS Business Analytics conference in Colorado. This year’s conference was particularly special as this was supposed to be the location of our 2020 conference, but well, we all know what happened there. I’d love to have you share a favorite moment from this year’s conference.

Laura Albert:

The absolute top highlight was announcing the winner of the Edelman Award. Congratulations again to Walmart.

Ashley Kilgore:

So what are some other highlights from this year’s meeting that you could share?

Laura Albert:

There are so many. The conference had great content and great networking. I would like to thank General Chair Aaron Burciaga and his team for their leadership organizing the conference. The two keynotes showcased great speakers who discussed opportunities for the analytics community. Hillary Mason, co-founder and CEO of Hidden Door discussed modern trends in the future of analytics. And Chris Tonas, chief technology officer at Pluralsight discussed how leaders in analytics need to upskill to futureproof their careers. And there were many opportunities to do so at various conference sessions.

The executive forum was a new addition to the business analytics conference that gathered over a 70 senior executives and enterprise leaders to discuss important issues in analytics, and provide networking opportunities. This is a great addition to the conference. I personally enjoyed the networking opportunities over breakfast, lunch, coffee breaks and receptions. The conference program was filled with opportunities for learning, exchanging ideas and inspiration. A popular event was the women and OR MS, cocktails and conversations reception, where past president, Radica Cocaney, shared her reflections on her analytics journey to a packed house and riveted audience.

Ashley Kilgore:

So in addition to the traditional conference schedule of keynotes and other speaker sessions and events, there were a number of special events, including MAPD, ECPN, and as you mentioned earlier, the Edelman Gala. Could you share a little special insight on these?

Laura Albert:

Sure. I’ll start with the Meeting of Analytics Program Directors, or MAPD. This provides program directors with an opportunity to meet and discuss a variety of topics relevant to their degree programs, including relevant trends, challenges, pain points, and educational innovation. The program directors learned from one another, and they came from business and engineering schools. I attended the reception afterward, and received a lot of positive feedback from the attendees. They were definitely energized, and I want to thank Nick Freeman of the University of Alabama for organizing the event.

I also want to highlight the Early Career Professionals Network. This convened to provide guidance to a new cohort of recent graduates entering industry, to build their professional networks and help them with their transition. The ECPN was co-chaired by Heather Moe at Esri, and Shingling Duan at Bayer Crop Science. And I attended the lunch for a few minutes, and it was great to see so many early career professionals get connected with the INFORMS community during their recent career transitions. And finally, the Edelman Gala. It was fantastic. We got to celebrate so many achievements in our community, culminating in the Franz Edelman Award, and I’m already looking forward to next year’s events.

Ashley Kilgore:

So now, this year’s conference saw a significant increase in the number of students and those on the cusp of launching their analytics careers in attendance. Could you share the unique value of attending this conference for this demographic?

Laura Albert:

I noticed that as well, and it was fantastic to meet so many early in their career, because the Analytics Conference, and actually the INFORMS annual meeting as well, have so much to offer early career colleagues in terms of networking, professional development and informal mentoring. Conference attendance and networking is most valuable early in one’s career, although at the time it’s not obvious to many, and that is true more so now than it’s ever been. We’ve learned that the pandemic has heavily impacted early career professionals and academics. They’re not as well-connected as in previous generations, and they haven’t been receiving as much informal mentoring.

So conference attendance, especially at the analytics meeting, really can make a big difference. I was pleased to meet so many early career professionals, many of whom were attending their first conference, and some who returned after last year’s analytics conference. So the analytics conference in particular has so many opportunities for networking built into it, as well as programming that’s relevant for a variety of professional roles and career stages, including early career stages. So I encourage INFORMS members who are now students and planning to pursue a career in industry or government, to plan to attend the analytics conference in the future.

Ashley Kilgore:

So now an upcoming initiative that was announced at this year’s conference is a brand new webinar series, INFORMS Insights, exploring industry, career paths and experiences. Why is this webinar series so unique and exciting?

Laura Albert:

I’m happy to tell you some more about this initiative. INFORMS is continuing to develop new programming for practice members, especially programming that would help early career professionals with transitions in their careers. The INFORMS Insights is a new webinar series, targeting early career professionals that will include talks by experts about career paths and experiences. The first webinar entitled, Lessons for a Productive and Fulfilling Career in Analytics; 10 tips from a NASA Data Scientist, will be delivered by Doug Trent, a senior data scientist at NASA. Several other seminars have been scheduled, and more are coming. So please sign up and plan to attend some of these.

Ashley Kilgore:

Something else I wanted to talk about is the work being done on the official INFORMS tagline. We’re getting so close without giving too much away, could you share an update with our listeners?

Laura Albert:

I’m going to give a few things away. I am so excited about this tagline. We’re doing it the right way by gathering feedback from many stakeholders along the way, and we’ve narrowed it down to five taglines. So we are close, but five taglines are not quite final. There might be some final edits here in the home stretch, but the five finalists are, Smarter Decisions for a Better World, Data and Decisions for a Better World, Advancing Data and Decision Sciences, Making Connections, Informing Decisions, Solving Problems, and finally, Smarter Decisions, Deeper Connections, Solving Problems.

I actually like all of these taglines, and feedback was collected at the analytics conference, and we are casting a wider net to gather some more feedback from our community before we’re tallying the final votes and gathering the final feedback. And I’m really excited, because I frequently tell others that I’m the president of INFORMS, and as a result I have to tell people what INFORMS is on a regular basis, and I’m looking forward to a tagline that will make that work a little easier. And also, position INFORMS better all the time, even when a member is not there with a handy explanation.

Ashley Kilgore:

So fingers crossed, by the time our next interview rolls around, we’ll be able to share what that tagline is.

Laura Albert:

I’m anxious for that too.

Ashley Kilgore:

Looking ahead to the rest of the year, what are some other initiatives or INFORMS events that you’d like to highlight?

Laura Albert:

I’d like to highlight four initiatives and events. The first is the INFORMS Insights webinar series that we already discussed. There will be a signup available, and you’ll see some information on INFORMS Connect on the website. We also have two conferences coming up in the coming months. The INFORMS Healthcare Conference is July 26th, the 28th in Toronto. And of course, the INFORMS annual meeting will be in Phoenix from October 15th to 18th. And last but not least, there is an INFORMS book club, and it’s fun, and there’s some information on INFORMS Connect and it’s all done remote. So it’s a fun way to read some books and discuss them with others online.

Ashley Kilgore:

That’s great. And FYI for our listeners, I’ll include links to all the events that Laura mentioned in the show notes, so you can just, one click away. So Laura, thank you again so much for joining me to share an update on the latest happenings at INFORMS. Before we wrap up, are there any final thoughts you’d like to share?

Laura Albert:

Yeah, can I have a little bit of a random OR story here? I guess, it’s not exactly random.

Ashley Kilgore:

Of course.

Laura Albert:

Well, George Dantzig is a famous pioneer in OR who developed the simplex algorithm, and his contribution to linear programming is of course legendary to us. Many informed members might not be aware that the film, Goodwill Hunting, was loosely based, not on George Dantzig, but a piece of the movie was based on George Dantzig. In the movie, Matt Damon plays an MIT janitor who easily and anonymously solves a difficult math problem posted on a chalkboard in a hallway. And this is based on an anecdote from the life of George Dantzig. He came to class late one time, and wrote down what he thought were the homework problems, and they were just listed on the board, and he solved them, but he didn’t know that they were unsolved math problems, not homework problems. He had just missed the announcement at the beginning of class.

And he said, based on that, “If I had known that the problems were not homework, but were in fact two famous unsolved problems in statistics, I probably would not have thought positively, would’ve been discouraged and never would’ve solved them.” And that would’ve been a shame, because that turned into really important work in this dissertation. So there’s two points. First is, see Good Will Hunting if you haven’t. It’s a pretty good movie. And second point, which is the more important point, is that I encourage our community to continue to tackle hard problems. We have such a great history of this in our community, and I’ve always been impressed how the OR community has never shied away from really hard problems in theory, computation, or practice. And I just returned from the Analytics Conference, and was at the Edelman Gala, and that reinforces the fact that we solve hard problems and we make a real difference in the world. And I just wanted to recap with that fun anecdote.

Ashley Kilgore:

Thank you so much, Laura. I’m definitely going to go re-watch Goodwill Hunting now with a new eye for that detail.

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