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The winners of six prestigious INFORMS prizes will describe the analytics and O.R. work that earned them honors. Don't miss these first-in-class talks during the conference.

Franz Edelman Award
Competition: Monday, Track 1
Winner's Reprise: Tuesday, 8:00-9:00am

INFORMS Prize
This prestigious INFORMS Prize honors an organization that has effectively integrated O.R. and the management sciences into its operation and has applied the principles of OR/MS in pioneering, varied and lasting ways. The 2011 prize winner, Sasol Technology, will describe their innovative O.R. work in the energy and chemicals sectors in a Tuesday session. The 2012 winner will be announced during the Edelman Gala.

Daniel H. Wagner Prize
Sponsored by CPMS, the Practice Section of INFORMS, the Wagner Prize recognizes the quality and coherence of analysis used in practice, with an emphasis on strong mathematics applied to practical problems, supported by clear and intelligible writing. The 2011 winning team, Karl Kempf and Evan Rush of Intel, will be honored at the Edelman Gala and present their work on "Product Line Design and Scheduling at Intel" in a Tuesday session.

UPS George D. Smith Prize
The first UPS George D. Smith Prize will be awarded this year. Created in the spirit of strengthening ties between industry and the schools that educate analytics and O.R. practitioners, the prize honors an academic department or program for effective and innovative preparation of students. The award is named in honor of the late UPS CEO who championed O.R. within the company, and UPS has generously underwritten the prize in his memory. The 2012 winner will be announced at the Edelman Gala, and will describe their program in a Tuesday session.

Innovation in Analytics Award
Sponsored by the INFORMS Analytics Section, this brand new award recognizes creative and unique developments, applications or combinations of analytical techniques. Its goal is to promote the awareness of the value of analytics in unusual applications or in creative combination to provide unique insights and/or business value. The 2012 winner will be announced on Monday and will present their work in a Monday session.

Spreadsheet Guru Competition 2012
The 2012 Spreadsheet Guru Competition will kick off at 2:00pm Pacific Daylight Time Sunday, April 15. Sixteen pre-qualified contestants from around the world via the web will face off with those brave enough to meet them on the day of the conference. The winner will be announced shortly after the end of the contest and will speak on Monday, in the Track 6 session at 3:40-4:30pm, to explain the solution process using their spreadsheet.

Six organizations compete for the 2012 Edelman Award, vying for honors as the most outstanding examples of O.R. and analytics in practice: Carlson Rezidor Hotel Group, TNT Express, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Intel Corporation, Danaos, and Hewlett-Packard. The finalists will be honored and the winner announced at the Monday evening gala banquet (included in your registration fee). Click here for details.

poster sessions on Monday and Tuesday, 2:45pm-3:35pm, offer an inside look at analytics and O.R. across a wide range of industries and organizations. Presenters will be available to describe their work and answer questions - dessert will be served. Organizations showcasing their work include IBM, Quintiles, Booz Allen Hamilton, Mu Sigma, Oracle, Alstom Grid, Xerox, Mayo Clinic, and more.

Plenary Speakers

Hal Varian, Chief Economist, Google, and Professor Emeritus, University of California, Berkeley will explain Predicting the Present with Google Trends. Bob Page, Vice President, Analytics Platform, eBay, addresses Digital Analytics at the World's Largest Online Marketplace. Click here for a preview.

Leaders in Business and Academia

P&G - Glenn Wegryn, Associate Director of Analytics
LinkedIn - Manu Sharma, Principal Research Scientist
Verizon Wireless - Anne Robinson, Director of Supply Chain Strategy & Analytics
SAS - Aiman Zeid, Principal Business Consultant & Global Program Manager
Nestlé - Robert Wang, Senior Business Analyst
Intel - Karl Kempf, Director of Decision Engineering
Deloitte - Hristo Trenkov, Lead, Risk Modeling
MITRE - Thomas Berry, Senior Analyst
Ford Motor Company - Don Zhang, Cost Optimization Analyst
RAND - Robert Lempert, Director, Pardee Center for Longer-Range Global Policy
...and many more. Click here for all program information.

SPRIG, the INFORMS Spreadsheet Productivity Research Interest Group, welcomes contestants to its first Spreadsheet Guru Competition, being held in conjunction with the Analytics Conference on Sunday, April 15. You can join the competition via the web or onsite at the conference, but must be registered prior to 2:00pm April 15. To register and for more information, email rcarter@equationconsulting.com or alan.taber@lmco.com. Contestants who are onsite at the conference must be in the room at 2:00pm with their own laptops and enough battery charge for two hours. All walk-up contestants and the top 16 preliminary round contestants from around the world will receive a problem statement at the same time, and will be judged on clarity of solution and on solving speed. From the 2:00pm competition, eight contestants will reach the semi-finals and four will reach the finals. The winner will be announced shortly after the end of the contest and will speak on Monday, in the Track 6 session at 3:40-4:30pm, to explain the solution process using their spreadsheet (arrangements will be made for remote access if the winner is not onsite at the conference).

In this high-level panel discussion on Monday 4:40-5:30pm, experts will explore the excitement, promise and challenge of big data. What's the real state of big data analytics today, both among the major players like Google, eBay, and LinkedIn as well as among startups in many industry areas? What are the current challenges organizations face in tapping the value of their data? Thornton May, futurist and Executive Director, IT Leadership Academy will moderate. Panelists are Diego Klabjan, Associate Professor and Director, Master of Science in Analytics Program, Northwestern University; Thomas Olavson, Director of Operations Decision Support, Google; Blake Johnson, Assistant Professor, Engineering-Economic Systems, Stanford University; Daniel Graham, General Manger of Enterprise Systems, Teradata; Michael Zeller, CEO, Zementis, Inc.

This by-invitation program is designed to provide decision makers with a bottom-line understanding of how analytics is being used to drive better business decisions. The program begins with a networking reception Sunday evening, April 15. A Meet the Experts Discussion Forum takes place on Monday, 9:10-10:30am. This is an in-depth opportunity for senior executives to connect one-on-one with industry experts who have launched and grown successful analytics capabilities in their organizations. Executives from these companies will serve as discussion leaders: Google, SAS, Cisco, IBM, P&G, Boeing, Jeppesen, Princeton Consultants, Schneider National, HP, Verizon Wireless, and UPS.

We all know INFORMS needs more offerings for executives, right? After all, if they know more about O.R. and analytics and appreciate its usefulness, that's better for all of us. Well, here's your chance to engage your executives. Recommend your executives attend INFORMS 3rd annual Executive Forum at the Analytics Conference. Exciting program has been developed just for them. Click here for more information and to request registration.

April 15-17, 2012, Hyatt Regency, Huntington Beach, California
http://meetings.informs.org/Analytics2012
Featuring World-Class Organizations Showcasing the Strategic Use of Business Analytics and O.R.
Register Now - Avoid Lines On-site
Team discounts for the third and additional registrants from the same organization. Click here to register.

INFORMS is saddened to announce that Editor-in-Chief Uriel G. Rothblum passed away on March 26, 2012, after a sudden illness. He was an important scholar and dedicated leader of the INFORMS journal Mathematics of Operations Research. Our thoughts are with his family. Those of you who would like to remember him are invited to post words of memory in a blog page set up by the Technion at http://ie.technion.ac.il/Home/Users/rothblum0.html.
J. G. "Jim" Dai, MOR Area Editor for Stochastic Models, will serve as Interim Editor-in-Chief through the end of 2012.