Alok Gupta

Title

  • Curtis L. Carlson Schoolwide Chair in Information Management, Professor, Department of IDSc, Minnesota Carlson, University of Minnesota

Education

  • Ph.D., Management Science and Information Systems, The University of Texas at Austin
  • M.S., Mine Electrical Systems, The Pennsylvania State University
  • BTech, Mining Engineering, IIT Varanasi, India

Professional Experience

  • Academic Director, MABA, 2024–present
  • Senior Associate Dean, Faculty, Research and Administration, Minnesota Carlson, 2015–2024
  • Chair, Department of IDSC, Minnesota Carlson, 2005–2014
  • Professor, Department of IDSC, Minnesota Carlson, University of Minnesota, 2005–present
  • Assistant Professor, Department of OPIM, University of Connecticut, 1996–2020
  • Publisher designate, MIS Quarterly, 2004–present

Selected INFORMS and Related Activities - Member since 1997

  • 2017–2022: Editor-in-Chief, Information Systems Research (ISR)
  • 2023–present: Advisory Senior Editor, Information Systems Research
  • 2016–2017: Member, INFORMS Publication Committee
  • 2012–2014: Special Issue Co-Editor (Business Analytics), Management Science
  • 2014–2016: Special Issue Co-Editor (Ubiquitous IT and Digital Vulnerabilities), ISR
  • 2009: Ad-hoc Departmental Editor (IS), Management Science
  • 2007–2017: AE, Management Science
  • 2008–2016: SE, Information Systems Research
  • 2002–2007: AE, Information Systems Research
  • Co-founder, INFORMS ISS Distinguished Fellow Award; ISS Advisory Committee member
  • Chair: INFORMS ISS Practical Impact Award Committee (2022); ISS Distinguished Fellow Award Committee (2021)

Selected Professional Honors and Awards

  • INFORMS Fellow Award, 2024
  • AIS LEO Award (lifetime contributions to the Information Systems field), 2021
  • INFORMS ISS Practical Impacts Award, 2021
  • INFORMS ISS President’s Service Award, 2021
  • AIS Fellow, 2016
  • INFORMS ISS Distinguished Academic Fellow, 2014
  • INFORMS ISS Design Science Award, 2011, 2012, and 2021 (three separate research streams)
  • INFORMS eBusiness Section Best Paper Award, 2009
  • AIS Inaugural Impact Award, 2020
  • NSF CAREER Award, 2001; among first business school faculty to receive this award
  • Rated among top-5 IS researchers and top-30 Management scholars across all disciplines (FT-50), 2025

Candidate Statement

INFORMS has a flourishing publication suite, yet our community faces three converging pressures that demand active leadership: a review process that inconsistency; a persistent gap between the rigor of our research and its reach beyond academia; and the rapid arrival of generative AI, which is disrupting how manuscripts are written, reviewed, and consumed. Having spent six years as Editor-in-Chief of ISR and on the boards of Management Science and ISR, I have confronted these pressures as author, reviewer, AE, DE, and EIC. If elected as Vice President of Publications, I will pursue three concrete initiatives.

1. Restoring editorial accountability and protecting creative research from an overly conservative review culture. The most corrosive pattern I observed across thousands of manuscripts at ISR was not slow reviews – it was editors relaying contradictory reviewer demands back to authors without exercising independent judgment. As an associate editor at ISR and Management Science, I overruled at least one reviewer on almost half the papers I accepted and roughly 10% of those I rejected, because the editor’s job is to evaluate contribution, not aggregate reviewer opinion. I will bring some of the ideas (dashboards, active advice mechanisms) to other INFORMS’ journals. I will work with editors to establish clear decision timelines, hold editors accountable for resolving reviewer conflicts rather than passing them to authors, and require that reviewers base their critiques on substantiated claims. Our journals commit too many Type II errors where they reject creative, high-quality ideas because the review process is designed primarily to avoid Type I errors. That balance needs to shift.

2. Using generative AI to close the gap between our research and the world that needs it. While at ISR, I launched a partnership with MIT Sloan Management Review and appointed a dedicated Senior Editor for Research Outreach to translate accepted ISR articles into content that practitioners and executives would actually read. That initiative worked, but it was manual and limited in scale. Generative AI now makes it possible to do this systematically across all 17 INFORMS journals. I propose to launch a Research Amplification Initiative that uses generative AI to convert accepted INFORMS articles into practitioner briefs, narrated executive summaries, and interactive knowledge bases grounded strictly in the published text. A short summary can be made open-access, whereas the full interactive layer becomes a membership benefit, simultaneously increasing societal impact and the value of INFORMS membership.

3. Establishing principled policies on AI in authorship and peer review (before the absence of policy causes lasting damage). Editors across INFORMS journals are already reporting a surge in manuscripts that appear substantially AI-generated, and some reviewers are using AI tools to write their reviews. Both trends, if left unaddressed, will hollow out the scholarly standards that make our journals worth publishing in. I will work with the INFORMS-wide task force to develop consistent author disclosure requirements that distinguish legitimate AI use (e.g., language editing, literature synthesis) from uses that compromise intellectual accountability. On the review side, AI tools offer real potential to help reviewers check internal consistency or flag statistical anomalies, and I am not opposed to that. But peer review derives its value from the exercise of expert human judgment, and I am in favor of developing guidelines that preserve authentic human involvement while allowing reviewers to use AI for specific, bounded tasks.

I have spent my career trying to make that process faster, fairer, and more open to genuinely creative work and to ensure that the research we publish reaches beyond the academy. I am committed to continuing that work for INFORMS and its members.

For more information, please visit: https://carlsonschool.umn.edu/faculty/alok-gupta