INFORMS NEWS: INFORMS Speakers Program
As executives, managers, researchers and practitioners in the highly dynamic arena of analytics, you know how valuable your time is. Learning from other experts about the most challenging and topical issues of today and how high-end analytics such as operations research can advance your organization is a way to acquire state-of-the-art knowledge and to gain a competitive advantage. INFORMS has a program to conveniently help you do just that.
The INFORMS Speakers Program (http://speakers.informs.org/) can be a valuable resource for you and your organization to draw from. It is designed to provide access to a wide range of excellent speakers who are experts in operations research and the management sciences and applying high-end analytics in a host of areas, from manufacturing, transportation, logistics and telecommunications to health care, financial services, the defense sector and public policy.
INFORMS speakers can deliver their expert, professional presentations at any requested level, whether for a general technical audience or a highly specialized one. They inform, instruct, illuminate, as well as entertain. Such a forum allows for lively question and answer discussions and helps to enrich professional discourse. As an analytics professional, you will learn from an INFORMS speaker about the latest methodological tools and techniques through advances in optimization, queueing theory, multi-criteria decision-making, networks, dynamic programming, game theory, risk analysis and other methodologies. In addition, you can learn about applications of these methodologies to such topics as sports analytics, disaster planning and response, manufacturing and service operations, even preventive medicine.
The list of speakers on the website is organized by geographic region: Northeast, Southeast, Southwest, Midwest and West, with some limited international representation. Alternatively, the speaker list may be searched by keyword or by a specific speaker name. Generally, the host organization is responsible for local expenses incurred by the speaker, but the program will pay for travel costs. For this reason, ideally a speaker should come from the same region as the sponsoring organization; however, exceptions can be made.
Organizations that have taken advantage of this resource have included INFORMS chapters (both professional and student ones), universities and colleges, professional groups, organizations who have existing analytics projects and those who are seeking to explore the advantages offered by OR/MS teams.
The advantages of inviting a speaker through the program include:
- learning about a topic of direct relevance to your organization,
- increasing visibility for your organization,
- networking with the speaker and audience, and
- enhancing an organization’s media presence.
On the website, each speaker has provided a list of potential topics that could be the basis of a talk at your organization. In addition, video previews of some of the speakers are available at http://speakers.informs.org/preview.html.
– Anna Nagurney and Tim Lowe
