As I’ve said many times in this column, the one analytics conference you don’t want to miss each year is the INFORMS Conference on Business Analytics and Operations Research.
Thousands of companies all over the world are competing for a finite number of data scientists, paying them big bucks to join their organizations – and setting them up for failure.
If you are a regular reader of this column, then you already know that I am currently engaged in two major long-term projects: a book of stories about the human interactions behind successful “real world” analytics [1] and a new MBA initiative on customer success management [2]. I started both of these early last year, and each will require a lot of hard work over a relatively long period of time.
April saw a major development in the data privacy world. Social media giant Facebook admitted that a rogue analytics company named Cambridge Analytica got a hold of detailed data on up to 87 million Americans, which was allegedly used to deliver custom messaging to groups of voters in the country to sway their opinions toward voting for a certain candidate.
The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) won the 2018 Franz Edelman Award for its use of operations research (O.R.) as part of a revolutionary approach to address the rapidly growing need for additional wireless spectrum in the United States and Canada.
An article co-authored by Scott Nestler and David Hunt, both longtime and active members of INFORMS, was named a winner of the Mission Award from the Mendoza College of Business at the University of Notre Dame.
Frontline Systems, developer of the Solver in Microsoft Excel, has launched Solver.Academy, its online learning platform for predictive and prescriptive analytics. Frontline also announced that it has surpassed 500,000 users of its cloud-based advanced analytics tools, aimed at spreadsheet-literate business analysts who aren’t expert data scientists.
The 2018 INFORMS International Conference will be held in the world-class Taiwain International Convention Center (TICC) and the Grand Hyatt Taipei in beautiful Taipei City, Taiwan, on June 17-20. The conference theme is “A Better World Through Operations Research, Analytics and Artificial Intelligence.”
As many readers of this column already know, “Star Wars” (the movie) is one of my favorite topics for operations research.
