The 2019 INFORMS Annual Meeting in Seattle 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.
From well-connected computers, social networks, mobile shoppers and the digitization of our lives to the ability to put sensors into and onto just about anything, we have a tidal wave of data. Mobile connectivity itself is driving a significant change in how we think about data. When a customer “showrooms” – uses their phone in a retail store to compare prices online or uses their PC to purchase an item for after-work pickup at a local retailer – the lines between online and offline start to blur. And therein lie both challenges and opportunities.
I recently read a wonderful essay by the writer Pico Iyer entitled “The Beauty of the Ordinary” [1]. This lovely piece invites us to pay attention to the little things that we too often take for granted. Sharing a bit of his own life’s story, which has taken him from England to the United States and finally to Japan, he deftly uses the metaphor of the fading light of autumn to illuminate his broader points. Since reading this article, I have been careful to take notice of things that ordinarily sail right past me – and have frequently found myself surprised as a result.
Statisticians and analytics related professionals have been conducting time-to-event analyses across myriad applications for as long as data has been collected and analyzed. Governments and religious institutions throughout history have collected data on birth and death rates to better estimate resource demands and predict tax revenue. Insurance companies use sophisticated time-to-event models to predict accident, illness and mortality rates in order to set policy costs and forecast profits. Engineers use these techniques (often called reliability analysis) to model the lifetime and failure rates of mechanical or electronic systems and uncover the factors that impact those rates, producing metrics such as MTTF (mean time to failure) among others. Marketers have begun adopting many of these techniques to study important time-to-event phenomena of their customers, such as the rates of product adoption or time for a customer to upgrade a service contract.
The Winter Simulation Conference (WSC) is the premier international forum for disseminating recent advances in the field of dynamic systems modeling and simulation. WSC 2019 “Simulation for Risk Management” will be held Dec. 8-11 at Gaylord National Resort & Conference Center in National Harbor, Md.
I frequently tell my colleagues and friends that working in operations research is very much like traveling by hot air balloon; you know you are going somewhere, but generally, you have no idea where that is when you start. You have to just get aloft and see where the winds – made up of equal parts creativity and data – take you. That’s precisely the story you are going to read today.
In the last few articles I tried to put the spotlight on new developments in healthcare around the world. As we are getting closer to the end of 2019, I am energized to see positive movements in the healthcare analytics and health information technology space continuing worldwide. Let’s look at what is happening at home first.
