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TODAY'S KEY EVENTS
Plenaries and Keynotes
10-10:50am, Convention Center, West 301A Edward C. Prescott, Arizona State University and Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis
3:10-4pm, Convention Center, West 101
Principles to Successfully Navigate the Vortex of Innovation
Christopher B. Lofgren, Schneider National, Inc.
3:10-4pm, Convention Center, West 301A
IFORS Distinguished Lecture: Models and Algorithms for Passenger Railway Optimization Problems
Paolo Toth, University of Bologna
3:10-4pm, Convention Center, West 301A
Reprise of 2012 UPS George D. Smith Prize Award-Winning Presentation Tauber Institute for Global Operations, University of Michigan: Lawrence M. Seiford, Goff Smith Co-Directors and Diana Crossley, Managing Director |
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ADDENDUM TO SCHEDULE
Please click here to download a pdf of the addendum for late changes to the printed program.
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REGISTRATION
Registration will be open from 7am-5pm today.
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EXHIBITS OPEN TODAY 9AM-5PM
 You can get into the running to win an iPad2 just by visiting the exhibits. INFORMS will award one iPad during each afternoon coffee break in the Exhibit Hall on Tuesday. Congratulations to Monday's winner, Sonia Vanderby.
Just follow these easy steps:
- Stop by one of the exhibit booths to pick up a raffle coupon (different color coupon for each day).
- Fill out the coupon and get it stamped by the exhibitor.
- While you're at the booth, give the exhibitor an opportunity to tell you about his or her company's products!
- Place your completed coupon in the raffle bin by 4:15pm.
- Be present when the winning raffle ticket is drawn at 4:15pm.
- You can submit as many coupons as you like, but each must be from a different exhibitor.
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BLOG OF THE DAY
An Operations Research Nobel?
by Michael Trick
The Nobel Prize committee has never quite taken to operations research. If George Dantzig was not awarded the prize, it is hard to see what our field has to do in order to be recognized. But many recipients are well-known in our field and their research has drawn from, and inspired, research in operations research. This year's Economics award recognizes two economists, Al Roth and Lloyd Shapley, who are very well known in our field, and have strong ties to INFORMS and its predecessor organizations.
Shapley was recognized by ORSA with the von Neumann Theory Prize in 1981. Here is part of the citation: Keep reading.
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TUESDAY COMMUNITY BUSINESS, RECEPTION, & NETWORKING MEETINGS: ALL WELCOME
Choose the community that is right for you and attend. Members and nonmembers welcome.
H= Hyatt and C= Convention Center
| CPMS Council | H - Cassidy |
7-9am
| | SpORts | C - West 106C |
6-7pm
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TODAY'S CAN'T-MISS SOCIAL EVENTS
Women in OR/MS Forum Luncheon
12:30-1:30pm, Hyatt, Regency C
$18 ($8 students) A limited number of tickets may be available on-site. Go to the INFORMS registration desk for information on availability. No tickets will be sold at the door. All those interested in issues related to women professionals in OR/MS are invited to join us. Sponsored by Georgia Tech, Stewart School of Industrial & Systems Engineering; SAS, Inc.; Texas A&M University, Dept. of Industrial & Systems Engineering; University of Alabama, College of Business; University of Massachusetts, Isenberg School of Business; University of Arizona, Systems & Industrial Engineering; Northwestern University, Dept. of Industrial Engineering & Management Science; Virginia Commonwealth University, Dept. of Statistical Sciences & O.R; University of Texas at Arlington; Penn State Erie; and University of Texas at Austin, Operations Research & Industrial Engineering.General Reception
Get Your Kicks on Route 66
7:30-10pm, Convention Center, North Ballroom, level 1 (street level)
It began in 1926 as a roadway to bridge Chicago and the coast of California - a two-lane highway that rolled through Arizona and the vast Southwest, winding 2,400 miles through eight states and ending at the Santa Monica pier. In the 1930s, Dust Bowl victims of the Depression traveled Route 66 to forge new lives in California; in the 1950s and 60s, American families made it their preferred route to see the country. Route 66 became famous for its quirky roadside attractions, including teepee-shaped motels, frozen custard stands, Indian curio shops, and reptile farms. It has been memorialized and celebrated in songs, a hit TV series, and, most recently, Pixar's animated film, Cars.
You can travel the famous road yourself at our Tuesday General Reception. We'll have our own quirky and fun things to do: teepee putting, tequila bowling, tomahawk tosses, and beach ball basketball. The Rave, a classic rock band, will showcase a broad spectrum of musical styles, from pre-50s to current hits, including soul, Motown, blues, and country.
And, of course, we'll be serving up a hearty menu that features food from stops along the highway - including St. Louis style ribs, Arizona vegetarian fajitas, New Mexican three-cheese enchiladas, Texas beef strip steaks, and California avocado salad, topped off with a great Oklahoma pecan pie! Sponsored by Arizona State University. |
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SUBDIVISON AWARDS FOR TUESDAY
INFORMS Chapter/Fora Committee
Moving Spirit for Chapters
The Moving Spirit Award recognizes chapter volunteers who have made significant contributions to their local chapters. Winners: Frank Ciarallo, Cincinnati-Dayton Chapter; Stefan Karisch, Rocky Mountain Chapter; Ina Markham, Southeastern Chapter Presented: 7am, Chapter/Fora Officers Breakfast, Hyatt, Regency Ballroom C
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MONDAY'S INTERACTIVE SESSION WINNER
Congratulations to Irem Sengul  A third-year Ph.D. student at North Carolina State University, Irem Sengul's advisors are Dr. Julie S. Ivy and Dr. Reha Uzsoy. Their work is supported by NSF. The poster shows our work on modeling for equitable distribution of donated food in North Carolina. This research is being conducted in collaboration with the Food Bank of Central & Eastern North Carolina, which serves as a hub and branch for distributing food to other branches and agencies in a 34-county service area. We formulate linear models to address the trade-off between equity and effectiveness for the distribution of food donations. Furthermore, we present the optimal policy to allocate additional capacity to the counties in the considered service region. We use data obtained from the food bank, and our results provide useful insight to improve food bank's overall performance. |
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TUESDAY'S INTERACTIVE SESSION
General Interactive Session 12:30-2:30pm, Convention Center, West 301CD Lobby
Authors will be on hand, and prizes will be awarded. Cluster Chairs: Young Jun Son and Jian Liu, University of Arizona; and Burcu Keskin, University of Alabama.
Note to participants: Please have posters installed no later than 12:25pm, so that judging may start on time.
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TUESDAY'S TUTORIALS
All sessions held in Convention Center, West 207
8-9:30am
Combinatorial Auctions
Subramanian Raghavan, University of Maryland
11am-12:30pm
Perishable Inventory Systems with Random Replenishments
David Perry, University of Haifa; and Wolfgang Stadje, University of Osnabrueck
1:30-3pm
Mining Social Media: A Brief Introduction
Pritam Gundecha & Huan Liu, Arizona State University
4:30-6pm
Particle Filtering
John Birge, University of Chicago
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INFORMS JOB PLACEMENT SERVICE OPEN TODAY AT 9AM
9am-5pm, Convention Center, Exhibit Hall
OK, you did the Job Fair on Sunday and met lots of great employers/candidates. Now it's time for on-site interviews to explore opportunities in academia, industry, and government.
In addition, the Job Placement Service offers
- Online access to job listings and applicant files
- Expanded information about jobs and applicants
- Weekly updates of the database
- Improved database search capabilities
- Online data entry for applicants and employers
- Extended availability of the database. www.informs.org/JPS
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Strategic Initiatives in Analytics
by Kimberly Harms
 | | Rina Schneur, Jack Levis, and Anne Robinson |
By now you have probably already heard, read, and inquired about the exciting new certification to be offered by INFORMS. INFORMS President-Elect Anne Robinson began the session with enthusiasm about the benefits of the program to both the INFORMS organization and individual members. The official certification title is Certified Analytics Professional; notated by CAP after the name. An initial question faced by many is the meaning of "analytics." Robinson answered the question directly with the official INFORMS definition: "The scientific process of transforming data into insight for making better decisions."
Also speaking today were Jack Levis, VP Practice, and Rina Schneur, INFORMS Past President. Levis attributed the progress of INFORMS' understanding and meeting the needs of practitioners to the input from members. He also talked about assets. In addition to the traditional list, data are a growing asset that requires qualified people who understand how to use them.
The INFORMS Continuing Education (CE) program is also gaining momentum. The objective of the CE program is to effectively and immediately help participants in their jobs. Schneur explained that the requirements of the CE program have developed from market studies using surveys, focus groups, and interviews. Main points include on-site and online components to the program; faculty that will be trained, contracted, and managed by INFORMS; and international considerations. As a result of diligence and attentiveness to members, INFORMS will deliver the highest-quality CE experience with topics focused on vital job skills.
The session ended with a round of questions from the audience about the CAP program, the direction of CE, and INFORMS outreach. All three welcomed member comments and ideas, and they requested you to be a proactive ambassador for INFORMS and analytics to your peers, organization, and professional communities.
For details about certification, visit www.informs.org/certification. The first exam date is scheduled for April 2013 and will be offered at the INFORMS Conference on Business Analytics in San Antonio, TX. A handbook will be released to describe the seven domains of the examination in more detail.
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Healthcare Applications
by Timothy Hopper
The Monday morning session entitled Healthcare Applications featured three presentations on mitigating the effects of large demand on emergency departments (EDs) and intensive care units (ICUs). Inadequate capacity in emergency rooms frequently results in "boarding," where patients wait on stretchers in hallways for hours or days until ED beds become available. Boarding is correlated with adverse outcomes for boarded patients. Insufficient resources in ICUs increase congestion in emergency departments where patients wait for ICU beds to become available, and this delay results in increased mortality rates, increased ICU length of stay, and an overall decrease in patient outcomes.
Galit Yom-Tov of Columbia University presented her research on the effects of speedups in congested ICUs. When ICUs become busy, medical staff will often shorten the stay of current patients to make room for new patients. Through an empirical study, the speaker showed that speedups occur in practice; however, speedup increases the probability of readmission for a speedup patient. With a queueing analysis, the speaker demonstrated conditions under which speedup is beneficial.
Carri Chan of the Columbia Business School presented her research on the effect of delay of admission into ICUs from emergency departments. She showed evidence that high utilization of ICU resources results in significant delay of admission. She presented a novel queueing model that estimates the dependence of ICU length of stay on admission delay.
Finally, Pengyi Shi of the Georgia Institute of Technology presented a queueing model that captures the endogenous nature of length of stay for inpatient hospital stays resulting from discharges primarily occurring between noon and 5pm. The speaker showed analytic results for predicting the queue length in this system and explained how shifting the discharge distribution could improve overall performance.
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Manufacturing - Fading or Phoenix?
by Kimberly Harms
 Wallace J. Hopp introduced the audience to the manufacturing industry of a half-century ago. Manufacturing was growing and the economy was strong; there was a virtuous cycle among companies and employees. But times have changed. The economy has dropped, and there are now roughly 12 million people employed in manufacturing in the United States, a decrease from historical figures. This said, manufacturing output has actually continued to increase. Exports have not fallen; imports have just grown more quickly. Research has shown that the economic complexity index, which considers diversity and ubiquity, explains more about economic growth than other predictors. Many figures were presented, all providing a better understanding of the realities of today's manufacturing industry. Hopp showed that manufacturing is still big, pays well, and has a large multiplier effect.
The United States currently manufactures 75% of the products it consumes. Figures from research show that this number could grow to 95% or fall to 40%. There are certain consumables such as food and wood products that will always be produced in the United States, based purely on cost. On the other hand, there are industries, such as apparel and furniture, which have mostly left and will not return.
Observable trends are changing the future of manufacturing. These include equalizing labor costs, increasing automation, and rising transportation costs. Education is a critical factor. The educational system must integrate the needs of industry to provide an appropriately skilled workforce. He stressed the importance of making a commitment to improving education by applying lean and manufacturing techniques. Also, Hopp sees great potential in the field of manufacturing and encouraged members of the audience to pursue research in the field.
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William Pulleyblank
by Rachel Ramirez  Monday's morning plenary speaker, William R. Pulleyblank, gave a delightfully engaging and insightful presentation on his views for the future opportunities and challenges of operations research. The entire convention hall was positively attentive throughout the presentation, which covered a mixed bag of topics such as his work on the IBM BlueGene/L supercomputer to the optimal scouting schedule for baseball recruiters. His notable comfort on stage may have been a result of his somewhat unconventional background dabbling as a Hollywood movie actor and now his current role as a U.S. Army Military Academy professor. Pulleyblank leveraged his introduction on-stage as an INFORMS "Phillip McCord Morse" lecturer to introduce one of the central themes of his presentation from Phillip McCord Morse's autobiography: the theme of observing how drastically life has changed over 60 years. Morse had witnessed one of the biggest changes imaginable, observing most citizens buying and driving automobiles from once taking care of their horses.
Pulleyblank followed Morse's observation with a question to the audience: "It's the early 2010s now; has the world changed in the last 60 years? And if so, what are the problems we, the O.R. community, should focus on? What are the problems my undergraduate students should be working on?" He stated that his observations over the year have led him to believe in these top three challenges for future O.R. problem solving. His three challenges followed the themes of (1) storage and availability of data, known as "big data"; (2) power and price performance of computers; and (3) communication. Pulleyblank's most critical research issues fell into three categories: - "How do you deal with large quantities of data?" With so much data, even with the fastest computers users may not have time to clean up the data before analyzing it, something the professor referred to as "dirty data" - his example of the pressing need for faster analysis was how in his own experience, he worked with data analytics and crime detection to detect credit fraud BEFORE payments were made.
- "How are you going to deal risk and uncertainty?" On this point the speaker addressed a lack of time and disappointingly had to fast-forward the presentation to his third point.
- Operational analysis needs to augment strategy and planning. His example here was how the airline industry does a good job of planning and operations and has to cover three types of optimization: schedule optimization, fleet optimization, and crew planning. Another important point was the airline industry does not have the luxury of being able to follow its plans because of "distractions" such as weather delays. He stressed that a lack of research exists in resiliency models where real-time planning is needed to deal with uncertainty and disruptions.
Pulleyblank concluded his brief speech noting his excitement to be alive in a time of such great opportunity and challenge. The service industries already have a huge demand for decision support strategies, and the need will only continue to grow. Pulleyblank's keys to success are to embrace the breadth of analytics, put theory to applications, and work with clients, which he noted, quite humorously, "the crankier the better, because they will drive you to solve the problem they actually care about."
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Time to Recall: A Duration Analysis Model of Recall Strategies and Effectiveness
by Kimberly Harms
 Are you sure what you are eating is safe? Thanks to the Food and Drug Administration, which oversees approximately 80% of the food selection available to U.S. consumers, the food you eat is usually safe. However, a problem arises when an available product has been impacted somewhere in the supply chain, reaches the market, and can pose a risk to the health and well-being of the consumer.
The presentation by Tracy Johnson-Hall of the College of William & Mary defined the problem and described the timeline associated with issuing a recall to the public regarding an unsafe food. Recalls are a reactionary step to reducing the damage caused by the unsafe food. The challenge is to identify that a risk exists and then issue a recall that will effectively reduce the risk to the consumer. For example, it would not be an effective recall if made after all of the unsafe food is consumed.
The parameter of interest in this study is the time to recall, defined as the time from end of production to issuance of recall. Past recalls have shown that the time to recall can depend greatly on the type of item being recalled. The research of the study employed survival analysis to evaluate strategies and effectiveness of recall procedures relative to the time to recall. Regarding the supply chain, there are two points where risk can be identified to prompt a recall. The first is internally. It is best to detect a risk inside the supply chain before reaching the consumer. The other point is externally, where the consumers or government identify the health risk. At either point, it is easy to understand the value of having an effective recall system that can prevent unsafe food from being consumed.
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Optimizing Patient Schedules for Improving Healthcare Delivery
by Timothy Hopper
Anyone who has seen a physician or dentist knows that outpatient clinics often have long waiting times. Optimal appointment scheduling is a complex problem: among other complexities, clinics face uncertainties in parameters such as service duration, patient tardiness and unpunctuality, physician tardiness, and no-show rate, and appointment interruptions. Effectively scheduling patients under such uncertainty is a difficult problem that has eluded a grand, unified theory. Nevertheless, operations researchers continue to chip away at this problem.
In the Monday afternoon session Optimizing Patients' Schedules for Improving Healthcare Delivery, three speakers presented their advances on the outpatient scheduling problem. First, Ken Klassen of Brock University presented his research on simulation optimization for scheduling family practice clinics. Klassen determined that the dome-shaped appointment policy performs well under a variety of uncertainty conditions. In this policy, patients are given appointments with short interarrival times at the beginning and end of the day, whereas interarrival times increase toward the middle of the day.
Antoine Legrain of �cole Polytechnique Montreal presented his research on "Online Optimization of Radiotherapy Patient Scheduling." Legrain combined stochastic programming methods with online optimization algorithms to provide computationally tractable approaches to online appointment scheduling.
Finally, Davood Astaraky of the University of Ottawa developed his Markov decision process model for surgery scheduling and capacity planning. Astaraky used simulation-based approximate dynamic programming (ADP) for surgery block scheduling. The speaker showed that the ADP can improve the surgery scheduling process by taking different patient classes into account.
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Computational and Analytical Challenges and Opportunities in Personalized Medicine
by Kimberly Harms
 George Poste, Chief Scientist at Complex Adaptive Systems Initiative and Del E. Webb Chair in Health Innovation at Arizona State University, has an extensive list of credentials stretching through the pharmaceutical and health industries. Beginning the presentation, Poste offered the audience a rhetorical question; "How will healthcare be sustainable?" He explained that we currently engage in a "bill more, do more" healthcare system that is reactive based on patient health episodes.
The existing care system has an error rate of 50% on initial diagnoses. Point taken. Personalized - though Poste prefers the term "precision" - medicine offers many improvements, summarized as the right diagnosis and right treatment for the right patient at the right time. Many details and technical components were described for creating the personalized medical care system, based on utilizing an individual's unique genetic profile to define care required.
He acknowledged the immediate challenge of how to handle the massive amount of data associated with the human genome. The storage cost for one full genome is approximately 3 GB. He summarized by saying that "data is the fastest-growing resource on earth." Many technological advances have been made in regard to the human genome, yet society lacks the physical infrastructure to support the use of all of the information gathered. In addition to collecting the information, the steps of how to analyze and how to act on the results must be faced.
Poste led an engaging presentation that offered insight for the future of healthcare and societal involvement. Individual sectors, such as biomedicine, engineering, and computing, will need to join in solving healthcare issues. Universities will need to face the measurable infrastructure issue of moving data. Also, the concentration of funding on therapeutic care must change to concentrate on diagnostic care.
More information is offered at www.casi.asu.edu/.
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2012 TUTORIALS ONLINE BOOK
 All attendees receive free exclusive early access to the INFORMS 2012 TutORials in Operations Research online book concurrently with the meeting. Entitled "New Directions in Informatics, Optimization, Logistics, and Production," the 2012 volume is the perfect complement to the series of talks. For access, visit here and log in using your INFORMS username and password. Nonmember meeting attendees: use the username and password you selected as part of the online registration process. NOTE: your username and password also appears on the receipt in your registration envelope. All INFORMS 2013 members receive access on January 1, 2013. You can order the 2012 book or previous volumes (CDs 2005 - 2009) through the TutORials website or visit the INFORMS Booth #58.
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ENGAGE WITH SOCIAL NETWORKING TOOLS
INFORMS is using the latest in social networking technology to keep you informed and connected at the Annual Meeting.
Send Us a Video, Get a T-shirt
We want your videos taken at the INFORMS Annual Meeting. All suitable videos will be posted on the Annual Meeting website and on the INFORMS YouTube channel. Show us INFORMS in your eyes and help us build our video library. For more information and where to upload your video, click here.
Photos
We want your photos, too. Take photos and send them to [email protected], and we'll post them on the Annual Meeting website.
Pinterest
Check out the INFORMS Annual Meeting Board on Pinterest for interesting places to visit, eat, and enjoy in Phoenix. Follow the board for updates.
Blogs
Visit the Annual Meeting website during the meeting for commentary from your friends and colleagues. Blogs will be posted to the website before, during, and after the meeting. Be sure to check back frequently for new posts.
Tweets
All attendees are invited to share what they are doing and seeing in real time. Remember to add hashtag "#informs2012" to your tweets, and they will appear on the Annual Meeting homepage during the meeting. Tweets will be displayed in real time in a large video monitor at Registration. Stop by the INFORMS booth and pick up your "Tweeter" ribbon. Also "follow" the official conference twitter feed, INFORMS2012, to receive important conference announcements.
LinkedIn
Connect with other attendees on the Annual Meeting LinkedIn Group to discuss key topics. Click here to join the Annual Meeting LinkedIn group.
Facebook
"Like" INFORMS on Facebook and let other INFORMS members know you are attending the 2012 INFORMS Annual Meeting by RSVP'ing.
Podcasts
Liven up your downtime with an INFORMS podcast. Download a podcast.
Free Wireless Internet
It's easy to stay connected. The Phoenix Convention Center features free wireless Internet located in the Exhibit Hall in the Convention Center. Hyatt: Wireless access is available on the second floor.
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ADVERTISE IN eNews Daily
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SOCIAL NETWORKING QUICKLINKS
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2012 ANNUAL MEETING QUICKLINKS
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THANK YOU TO OUR SPONSORS
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