INFORMS News: Roundtable report

– Pete Buczkowski

The Roundtable fall meeting was held at the Westin Charlotte on Nov. 12-13, 2011. The meeting theme was “The Practice of Risk Analysis and Management.”

Keeping with the theme of the meeting, several participants started out on Saturday by taking some personal risk and testing their racing skills at Victory Lane Karting – one of the most realistic indoor karting venues in the heart of NASCAR country. As my first experience, I quickly learned that high-speed karting is not for the faint of heart (did everyone read the waiver?), and that we have some very competitive colleagues! I wasn’t the only one with a sore back…

The main program was Saturday evening and Sunday. The invited speakers represented diverse experience and expertise: Aaron Brown, columnist/author and risk manager at AQR capital, spoke about the influence of political philosophy on use of government statistics. David Robinson, Sandia National Laboratory, provided an interesting overview of the risk management activities supporting the recent launch of the Mars Science Laboratory (MSL). Robert Lempert, RAND Corporation, discussed a framework for quantitative “robust decision-making” under conditions of deep uncertainty, with examples from government planning and policy making. Kete Long, GE Capital Treasury, described financial risk management models in use at GE. Henry Petroski, Duke University, talked about the critical role of failure in engineering design and risk management, illustrated with examples from bridge building and the Titanic. David Simchi-Levi, MIT and IBM, spoke about the role and manufacturing flexibility in risk management and the diminishing returns of incremental flexibility.

To complement the presentations, three related books were distributed to meeting participants: Aaron Brown’s “Red Blooded Risk: The Secret History of Wall Street,” Henry Petroski’s “To Engineer Is Human: The Role of Failure in Successful Design” and David Simchi-Levi’s “Operations Rules: Delivering Customer Value through Flexible Operations.” The formal program concluded with a joint meeting with the INFORMS Board, which included an update on the INFORMS Analytics initiative.

Those of us attending the Dutch treat dinner celebrated another successful meeting at the nearby Mimosa Grill with excellent food, drink and conversation.