O.R., AI activities expand INFORMS’ outreach, impact

In my last column I wrote about our place in the fast-moving artificial intelligence (AI) race. After another 60 days, I am finding that “fast-moving” also applies to the activities in INFORMS – activities focused on O.R. and AI and those expanding our reach and impact.

At the INFORMS Board of Directors meeting in April, the Board engaged in a strategic issue session focused on AI and O.R., the synergies and opportunities at the nexus of these two disciplines, and a vision for INFORMS. The session was led by the AI Strategy Committee and began with a well-researched background presentation.

Following the committee’s presentation, the Board and the AI Strategy Committee members broke into several different groups for a deeper dive into a wide range of strategic and tactical AI-related issues. In all, we looked at 11 different topics and several current, new and potential strategies were discussed.

The AI Strategy Committee is drafting two white papers for the Board about O.R. and AI based upon these strategic discussions. One will be focused internally with the goal of providing a vision for INFORMS, including increasing awareness of the synergies and opportunities for O.R. with and in AI/ML, better positioning INFORMS and the profession to contribute to and benefit from AI, and to build on and enhance our capabilities. The second paper will be externally focused to develop appropriate mindshare among AI stakeholders including funding agencies, sister societies and policy makers in the White House administration, Congress and private sector. The objective would be to articulate the importance of O.R. and advanced analytics techniques to the types of decision processing and deployment that is vital to successful AI implementations.

Since the Board meeting, I have heard from many of our members, committees and subdivisions about current activities and actions they are employing with O.R. and AI. For example:

• INFORMS subdivisions already have more than 30 O.R. & AI sessions planned for the 2019 INFORMS Annual Meeting in Seattle.
• The Committee on Teaching & Learning is exploring opportunities to incorporate AI into OR/MS curricula.
• The Professional Development Committee is developing a course to aid in educating faculty on AI and adapt courses to O.R. & AI.
• The Publications Committee is developing a keyword analysis to identify AI papers being published in INFORMS journals and considering special issues and an Editor’s Cut collection. 

And that’s just the start. More information will be shared on these and other efforts as they take shape and become available.

Another exciting development that has come from O.R. & AI discussions is the possibility of expanding collaborations with sister societies. These opportunities could potentially include joint conferences, a joint journal, NSF workshops, case competitions and other activities that foster a more robust cross-disciplinary culture across not only AI and O.R., but also industrial engineering, computer science and others. This is an early-stage discussion, but I hope our community takes this effort in the important spirit in which it is intended: O.R. and analytics, along with INFORMS, our journals, conferences and programs, do not exist inside a bubble or silo. There is growing demand for our skills and talents, and part of our responsibility as a professional society and community is to help facilitate our shared growth and success. 

Expanding Reach, Influence of Journals

INFORMS journals and editors often serve as standard-bearers for our community. And though widely respected in their own circles of influence, they can be expanded to have even greater reach and impact. An example is the work of Chris Tang and the INFORMS journal Manufacturing & Service Operations Management (M&SOM).

Over the past few years the M&SOM journal has worked together with both the MSOM Society and businesses in ways that, as Chris wrote to me, “… are intended to encourage and enable our MSOM members to engage in research that is relevant to practice.” A highlight was the data-driven research competition chaired by Gad Allon (Wharton School) and Chris Tang (UCLA) in which researchers could work with unique problems and data shared by Cainiao (the logistics arm of Alibaba in China).

Cainiao, which participated as a key partner, shared 1 trillion supply chain operational data ranging from product information (e.g., features, price, product ratings), customer information (e.g., time and location, purchase history), warehouse information (e.g., inventory level of different products at different locations), and shipment information (e.g., pick-up and drop-off operations managed by different logistics service providers). The winning paper and finalists will be published in M&SOM.

Additionally, 2019 marks the 65th anniversary of the journal Management Science. To celebrate the publication of the Volume 65, editor-in-chief David Simchi-Levi organized a conference titled “Innovations in the Science and Practice of Management” with an emphasis on the integration of theory and practice. The conference speakers covered the breadth of the journal and a special issue of Management Science is expected to be published. More coverage of the conference can be found on page XX.

We thank all those involved in these efforts, and encourage others to explore similar possibilities that expand awareness of the scope and relevance of our important profession. 

Advocacy

One important component of our advocacy effort is the INFORMS Government & Analytics Summit, which took place on May 20 in Washington, D.C. You can read about the Summit in greater detail here. I would like to thank Laura Albert who did a wonderful job both chairing the Summit Committee and moderating a great panel conversation. I would also like to extend my thanks to panelists Bala Ganesh, Karla Hoffman, Sheldon Jacobson, Don Kleinmuntz and David Shmoys for taking the time to come to Washington and for their part in helping make this year’s Summit a success. Lastly, we should all be honored that former Army Secretary John McHugh joined us with a keynote speech that helped illuminate the interest and support of O.R. and analytics at the highest levels of the federal government. He even helped frame a new O.R. problem for our community – the “two moose” problem – and you can see in his remarks at www.informsdcanalytics.org. You can also see the great panel discussion there as well.

In addition to the Summit, I had the opportunity in early May to attend a meeting at the White House with Dr. Lynne Parker of the Office of Science and Technology Policy and Dr. Kamie Roberts from the National Institute of Standards and Technology. Drs. Parker and Roberts are helping to lead the administration’s artificial intelligence strategy, and our conversation served to provide a strong introduction of our community and its relationship to AI and set the stage for ongoing discussions moving forward. Several colleagues from INFORMS, most notably, Sheldon Jacobson, have also been involved in these advocacy efforts. Sheldon and I have been invited to attend the NSF’s Engineering Research Framework Visioning Summit in July. I will provide a more complete discussion of our advocacy initiative in the August issue of OR/MS Today.

In all, it is hard to capture in one short column all of the energy and work that is taking place across INFORMS, but hope that these highlight some of the forward-leaning activities that will benefit our profession.

I am energized by all the efforts that are underway. They represent our collective efforts at making INFORMS an even more vibrant society and positioning our community to be an important source of expertise and knowledge about a world being transformed by technological change.