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INFORMS Journal Highlights from March 2017
AUTHOR SPOTLIGHT
LISA MAILLART
“I’ve been an active researcher in both maintenance optimization and medical decision making for many years. Although these areas of application have a lot in common, my work in these two areas was mostly in parallel. Looking at the optimal maintenance of implanted medical devices seemed like the perfect intersection of these two areas of interest.”More by this Author
Optimal Condition-Based Maintenance via a Mobile Maintenance Resource
Increasing Biomanufacturing Yield with Bleed–Feed: Optimal Policies and Insights
Optimal Pooling, Batching, and Pasteurizing of Donor Human Milk
Mitigating Information Asymmetry in Liver Allocation
Introduction to the Special Issue on Advancing Health Services
J.G. "Jim" Dai
Mathematics of Operations Research
“Reinforcement learning (RL) is concerned with how a decision-maker should learn to make good decisions while interacting with a poorly understood environment. RL can be applied broadly to optimize performance in games, web services, and robotic systems. One key challenge in RL is to design statistically efficient algorithms—algorithms that can learn a good decision-making strategy within a small number of interactions with the environment. This paper makes progress in this direction by developing a provably statistically efficient algorithm, which effectively couples two key ingredients of RL—exploration and value function approximation—for RL in large-scale deterministic systems. Though limited to deterministic systems, this paper is the first work that develops such an efficient algorithm for large-scale RL with general value function approximation.”
Efficient Reinforcement Learning in Deterministic Systems with Value Function Generalization
Zheng Wen, Benjamin Van Roy
Paul Maglio
Service Science
“It seems obvious that mobile applications increase customer interactions with a service or brand—but do mobile applications increase customer spending? Viswanathan et al. show that in many cases the answer is yes. But the story is a little more complicated. When customers find value in a mobile application, they use it, increasing their interactions with the firm and increasing their spending on firm products. When customers do not find value in a mobile application, they will not use it, and they may decrease their interactions with the firm and decrease their overall spending on firm products. So mobile applications can have positive or negative consequences depending on whether customers engage with them.”
The Dynamics of Consumer Engagement with Mobile Technologies
Vijay Viswanathan, Linda D. Hollebeek, Edward C. Malthouse, Ewa Maslowska, Su Jung Kim, Wei Xie
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New Articles
Service Science Editorial Board, 2017
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Clearing Analysis on Phases: Exact Limiting Probabilities for Skip-Free, Unidirectional, Quasi-Birth-Death Processes
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Convergence Properties of Weighted Particle Islands with Application to the Double Bootstrap Algorithm
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Heavy-Traffic Limits for a Fork-Join Network in the Halfin-Whitt Regime
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Construction of Asymptotically Optimal Control for Crisscross Network from a Free Boundary Problem
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Johnson Quantile-Parameterized Distributions
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INFORMS MEETING CALENDAR
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Editorial Board
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Editorial Thoughts: What and How ISR Publishes
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About Our Authors
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Research Spotlights
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2016 Guest Editors, Guest Associate Editors, and Ad Hoc Reviewers
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190,099
Article Downloads
Making Operations Management Fun: Littlefield Technologies
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Editorial—Big Data, Data Science, and Analytics: The Opportunity and Challenge for IS Research
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Scenario Analysis in Spreadsheets with Excel's Scenario Tool
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Applications of Operations Research in the Air Transport Industry
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Using Mathematics to Solve Some Problems in Industry
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Network Design and Transportation Planning: Models and Algorithms
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Simpler Spreadsheet Simulation of Multi-Server Queues
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Integrating Personality and Social Networks: A Meta-Analysis of Personality, Network Position, and Work Outcomes in Organizations
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Introduction to the Theory and Practice of Yield Management
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JOURNAL SPOTLIGHT
Interfaces
Editor-in-Chief: Michael F. Gorman
Impact Factor: 0.631
5-year Impact Factor: 0.878
Impact Factor: 0.631
5-year Impact Factor: 0.878
“I was happy to be a judge at this year’s Franz Edelman Award competition. The entrants demonstrated a wide range of techniques applied across a variety of applications and industries. From railroads to retirement homes, from blood collection to traffic reduction, the Edelman demonstrates how OR reaches all corners of the applied world. What all the entrants had in common—the defining attribute of all Edelman entrants—was a significant impact on the organizations which implemented the methods. Impact.
The Edelman Award, as well as most articles in Interfaces, redefine what impact is for our profession. The 'impact factor' is unfortunately named; the number of citations for an author or an article is a good indicator of influence on the literature and research in OR/MS. To be sure, such research has impact on research within our profession. However, the Edelman Award is a shining example of how articles in Interfaces have impact on the broader world. Real, measurable impact. The Edelman provides examples of best practices on how to practice what we preach. It is the acid test of where the rubber meets the road. It demonstrates the value of our profession, outside of our profession.
I encourage researchers to read Edelman and other Interfaces articles. Think about how your research might have an applied component. This is not an either-or; the best theoretical research should have impact on both the literature and on the world around. Cite the work that demonstrates the value and application of your methods, or develop your own application to make your work more real and reachable to those outside the profession.”