Choose the community that is right for you and attend. Members and nonmembers welcome.
H = Hilton and P = Parc 55

Technical Session
4:30-6pm, Parc 55, Market Street, floor 3
The INFORMS Analytics Maturity Model has its official launch at the Annual Meeting. Learn about the model designed for practitioners who are taking a look at how well their organizations perform - and how they can plan for improvement. Come with your questions and a readiness to use the model to better your organization. Make sure to stop by the INFORMS Analytics Maturity Model booth in the Exhibit Hall to take it for a spin and ask your question to INFORMS reps.

Designed for students, faculty, and practitioners, TutORials in Operations Research provides in-depth instruction on significant operations research specialties and practices.

All sessions are located in the Hilton, Continental 4, BR Level.

8-9:30am
Service Science: Toward Systematic Service System Innovation
Paul Maglio, University of California, Merced

11am-12:30pm
Cloud Computing and Decision Analytics
Stefan Voss & Leonard Heilig, University of Hamburg

1:30-3pm
Identification, Assessment and Correction of Ill-Conditioning and Numerical Instability in Linear and Integer Programs
Ed Klotz, IBM

9am-5pm, Hilton, Grand Ballroom
Explore opportunities in academia, industry, and government with on-site interviews.

In addition, the INFORMS Career Center 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
• http://careercenter.informs.org

By David Morton
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By Andrea Hupman
The 2014 Edelman Award winning submission is "Polio Eradicators Use Integrated Analytical Models to Make Better Decisions." This project represented a collaborative effort by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and Kid Risk, Inc. to tackle the endgame strategy for polio eradication. Four members of this collaboration were present to discuss the project: Kimberly M. Thompson, Radboud J. Duintjer Tebbens, Mark A. Pallansch, and Stephen L. Cochi. In addition, team member Steven G.F. Wassilak provided videotaped remarks.

Eradicating polio has been complicated by several factors. Tracking the virus is made difficult by the fact that most infections of the virus do not result in symptoms. Thus, tracking the virus by symptoms alone provides limited results. In addition, viruses do not respect international boundaries. Countries that have eradicated polio in the past have seen the importation of the disease from areas where it is endemic. Finally, strategy is complicated by the presence of several decision alternatives with different tradeoffs.

To inform policy decisions, the collaboration integrated different operations research and management science tools, including decision analysis, to frame the probability, probabilistic risk analysis modeling, and system dynamics modeling. The analytic results provided numerous insights and guided many strategic decisions. One of these insights was the critical importance of a rapid response to polio outbreaks. As a result, the World Health Assembly issued a resolution that created international guidelines for polio intervention and response.

Polio eradication efforts have resulted in measurable successes. India's last reported case of polio was in 2011, and India was declared polio-free in 2014. This project highlights how analytical methods are transformational to strategic planning and can make a real difference in peoples' lives. The tools developed in this project are currently being applied to other vaccine-treatable viruses and will continue to help improve the health of the world.

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By Andrea Hupman
MOOCs are a recent innovation in education that leave many wondering how they will affect the future of higher education. A panel addressed questions related to MOOCs. The following panelists addressed questions related to MOOCs: Dimitris Bertsimas, Kay Giesicke, Garud Iyengar, and Soulaymane Kachani, moderated by Martin Haugh.

The panel discussed their thoughts on several questions, from why offer a MOOC to how MOOCs are affecting education more broadly. MOOCs were discussed as a means to reach a broader audience and a way to create branding for a department and university. The usefulness of MOOCs in other areas such as creating a flipped classroom was also discussed. However, the panelists also cautioned that both MOOCs and flipped classrooms must be implemented very carefully. They change the dynamics of a course, and some things that work well in a traditional course do not work with a MOOC. One example of these differences is illustrated by an experience by one of the panelists who introduced a controversial idea in a MOOC, and the result was a disaster.

In the title question for the session on whether MOOCs are just a fad or here to stay, most of the panelists said, "Yes." Overall, there was wide agreement that MOOCs are affecting the educational landscape, but great uncertainty remains about precisely how.

By Chun Ye
It is 9:45am, I am navigating my way through the meeting rooms in Hilton, like a mouse in a maze. My destination: Alvin Roth's plenary talk. As a student who is interested in market design, I have been looking forward to hear the words of wisdom of this Nobel prize winning economist at this year's INFORMS Annual Meeting. I remember searching for the abstract of Al Roth's talk inside the giant directory given to me at registration. To my dismay, his talk has no abstract other than the intriguing title "Market Design & the Economist as Engineer." The lack of an abstract only adds more suspense to his impending talk, or so I thought. Read More.

By Kara Tucker
It is an exciting time for INFORMS publications and there are lots of changes ahead. VP of Publications Eric Johnson invited a special panel of INFORMS editors-in-chief (EIC) to discuss publishing hot topics and some problems, issues, and challenges journals are facing. Dave Woodruff, EIC of INFORMS Journal on Computing, thinks we are facing the most changes in publishing since the invention of the printing press! He is most excited about a new change for IJOC, one that competing journals have already been doing - continuous publication. This will allow papers to be published online faster and provide authors with volume/issue/page numbers for citation purposes. Since most readers read INFORMS articles online, this should be a welcomed change. Dave also mentioned that IJOC is vigorously encouraging data publishing, as he feels it is not valid science without this. IJOC is also seeking videos: a short two-minute video made for the general public and a five-minute video aimed at a technical audience.

Editors-in-chief Preyas Desai (Marketing Science), Ritu Agarwal (Information Systems Research), and Zur Shapira (Organization Science) all mention the trend of special issues for each of their journals. Although popular, special issues are time-consuming and Zur is working on creating a subcommittee for the sole purpose of generating special issue proposals and calls for papers. Preyas and Ritu are both behind the science-to-practice initiative that would transform nuggets of published research into teaching tools for the classroom or for sale to associate deans at universities.

INFORMS own Kate Luckey, senior managing editor, sat with the panelists as the 'jack-of-all-trades' expert in behind-the-scenes publishing. She spoke to one of the hottest topics at yesterday's meeting: plagiarism. Kate is well-versed in iThenticate - a CrossRef product used to detect plagiarism in research papers. INFORMS has been using this program for some time now, and it has helped detect several cases of plagiarism. However, what is harder to detect, and even define, is self-plagiarism. In some cases, authors are unaware that their actions regarding a research paper may be considered self-plagiarism (e.g., submitting the same paper to two journals, using large chunks of their own previously published paper in a new work without proper citation, overlapping research in two different but similar fields). Dave Woodruff suggests the best way to avoid self-plagiarism is to really label and cite what information is old versus new - cite in the literature review, cite again in the body of the paper, and cite again in the conclusion describing how the new research is different. Zur Shapira recommends instructing authors to write very specific cover letters to prove differences in research, that way the paper can be vetted before the rigorous review process, if necessary. Although difficult to monitor, INFORMS and their EICs have a good handle on plagiarism detection and should be able to reduce self-plagiarism with educating authors on how to handle submissions with journal-specific ethics policies and setting very clear vision statements to include the definition of plagiarism.

Other trends discussed by the panel include review-cycle time and how to reduce it; Open Access (the movement to make journal articles freely available to all); author submission fees; and journal content such as literature reviews, invited papers, and replies.

Journals are very important to the health of INFORMS and continue to grow and nurture the organization. INFORMS welcomes authors to submit their papers! Stay tuned for the video of the entire discussion on the INFORMS Video Learning Center website, and learn more about trends in research publications.

All attendees receive free access to the INFORMS 2014 TutORials in OperationsResearch: Bridging Data and Decisions online content concurrently with the meeting. Registrants of the 2014 INFORMS Annual Meeting have online access to the 2014 chapters, written by select presenters, beginning on November 1, 2014. Access this content using the link provided to all attendees by email or, if you are a 2014 member, simply login to INFORMS PubsOnLine. 

Program Book Kiosks
In an extended effort to go green, this year we are introducing kiosks to access a flip book of the full conference program. Two kiosks will be located in the Exhibit Hall and one kiosk will be located near the INFORMS Registration Desk in Yosemite BC.