Greatest Analytics Show on Earth

As I write this at 30,000 feet, my head is still spinning from the five days I just spent in Seattle attending the 2019 INFORMS Annual Meeting. They were still counting heads when I had to leave for the airport, but the event already had more than 7,300 attendees (an all-time record and about a thousand more than the previous high) who collectively made 1,550 presentations held in nearly 100 tracks over four days. Add to that an event chock full of business meetings, receptions, poster and tutorial sessions, a career fair, vendor booths, endless networking opportunities and countless other associated activities and you have the Greatest O.R. and Analytics Show on Earth.

Among the many conference highlights, in their keynote presentation on “INFORMS AI Strategy: Opportunities at the Intersection of AI and Operations Research,” INFORMS President Ramayya Krishnan of Carnegie Mellon and Pascal Van Hentenryck of Georgia Tech outlined an aggressive and inspiring agenda going forward that included several “grand challenges” facing the greater O.R. and analytics community. We’ll cover the specific challenges in upcoming columns.

Meanwhile, some of the many generic topics they discussed included AI for everything from safety and security and personalized medicine to integration with machine learning and optimization, as well as ethical, legal and fairness issues.

Many challenges and opportunities are out there. Clearly, this is an extraordinary time to be an analytics practitioner and researcher, and O.R. and analytics have an important role to play in addressing these major challenges. The question is, how will the greater analytics community respond? Only time will tell.

We’ll close with a logistical question that came to my mind during the conference: How do you feed 7,330 people who arrive at the same time at the general reception, all of them hungry from a long day of meetings, sessions and presentations? Answer: very efficiently. Thanks to a dozen parallel, double-sided, 30-foot buffet tables – all of them continuously resupplied – everyone was fed in short order.

Hey, we all have our own hard constraints, and this one was met in fine fashion as far as I’m concerned – as was the rest of the 2019 INFORMS Annual Meeting.