If you were given datasets with genetic information and yields from trials of different experimental maize hybrids, along with information on soil conditions and recorded weather of a U.S. growing region, how will you predict the performance of these hybrids? And what if the genetic information dataset included an average of 12,000 genetic markers or unique DNA sequences to identify each hybrid? Those were the questions that the CIAT data analytics team needed to address as part of an international competition organized by agribusiness giant Syngenta in partnership with INFORMS, the largest international society of operations research, management science, and analytics practitioners.

INFORMS, the leading international association for professionals in Operations Research and Analytics, announced today that the organization is hosting the 2018 Government and Analytics Summit in Washington, D.C. on May 21.

In a recently published a study in the INFORMS journal Marketing Science entitled “Some Customers Would Rather Leave Without Saying Goodbye,” researchers examine “a hybrid of the standard contractual and non-contractual categorization of customer–firm relationships” looking at two different types of churners they denoted as “overt”, those who inform an organization of their departure from the consumer base and “silent”, the consumers who simply disengage without notice, or just fade away by halting their purchase behavior. 

Syngenta and the Analytics Society of INFORMS have announced the finalists for the 2018 Syngenta Crop Challenge in Analytics. Now in its third year, the competition—which is hosted by the Analytics Society of the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS), aims to address the challenge of achieving global food security by fostering cross-industry collaboration between agriculture and advanced analytics experts.

INFORMS member Lawrence Wein of Stanford University, discusses the many factors that have resulted in hundreds of thousands of backlogged sexual assault kits  languishing untested in police department storerooms across the U.S., resulting in continued assaults by perpetrators, cases that have passed the statute of limitation, and lack of closure for victims. Wein concludes that a large one-time investment in testing the nation's backlog and investigating the resulting hits will pay off, both from a cost-benefit analysis perspective, as well as for the victims of these assaults. 

Tune in to hear sports commentator Steve Russell discuss using analytics to improve the selection process for the NCAA March Madness with an author of the Interfaces article "Using Mathematical Programming to Select and Seed Teams for the NCAA Tournament," on the March 22nd broadcast of Sports Scene.

Steve Gaskin, Bob Klein and Gerry Katz of Applied Marketing Science, Inc. have been invited to be among the first of a network of “Ambassadors” who have the interest, resources and skills to translate academic papers published in the INFORMS journal Marketing Science - including "The Effect of Calorie Posting Regulation on Consumer Opinion" by Dinesh Puranam, Vishal Narayan and Vrinda Kadiyali - into short articles that have the potential to reach and impact practitioners.

The entire commercial real estate market can be a guessing game, where occupancies fluctuate along with real estate values. But what if you could tap the power of data science to better develop future real estate strategies? That is the focus of a special session at the INFORMS Business Analytics Conference in April.

 According to an upcoming INFORMS journal Organization Science article,“Gender Bias, Social Impact Framing, and Evaluation of Entrepreneurial Ventures,” investors link a startup’s social mission to the warmth of its founder. Women perceived as warm are also considered competent, as previous research has shown.

From better protecting the world economy against cyber crime, to detecting and preventing life threatening sepsis infections, to creating virtual environments to interact with artificial intelligence technology, analytics is driving the great discoveries and advancements of the future. And there is no greater opportunity to be part of driving that future than the 2018 INFORMS Conference on Business Analytics and Operations Research.

Florida A&M University’s College of Science and Technology will be hosting a STEM student seminar series geared toward preparing students for opportunities in math and science. Tasha R. Inniss, the director of education and industry outreach for INFORMS, will be a guest presenter and will be speaking about her experience in the mathematics industry.

New research has developed an automated approach for narrowing down and ranking the field of Division 1 college basketball teams from 351 to the 68 that would play in the annual "March Madness" basketball tournaments, watched by more than 80 million people each year. The study, "Using Mathematical Programming to Select and Seed Teams for the NCAA Tournament," will be published in the INFORMS journal Interfaces.

HQ Trivia, a daily trivia game show launched in August that broadcasts live on smartphones worldwide and offers thousands of dollars in cash prizes, combines the fundamentals of TV game shows with mobile technology that makes users feel like winning thousands of dollars is at their fingertips. HQ Insiders, a group of data scientists from Georgia, have collected and analyzed questions from the game since October, providing some interesting insight. 

The "Oscar love curse" is not only super random, but apparently a thing that experts (yes, experts) have studied. The INFORMS journal Organization Science once published a study, "The Real Oscar Curse: The Negative Consequences of Positive Status Shifts," and determined while there's little to no evidence of a "professional Oscar curse," there is proof of a "personal" Oscar curse - possibly hinting at the ramifications winning an Academy Award has on actors' relationships.

The movies and TV are full of stories of women sabotaging other females at work. Miranda Priestly in The Devil Wears Prada, Katharine Parker in Working Girl and Amanda Woodward in Melrose Place immediately come to mind. But a new study has found that the “queen bee” syndrome in the workplace might not just be fictional. Turns out, women are more likely to clash with their female coworkers than with their male colleagues, according to a study in the INFORMS journal Organization Science.

Every year, analytics professionals from around the world attend the INFORMS Business Analytics Conference to interact with and learn from leading analytics professionals and industry experts and to gain real-world insights on a successful analytics strategy. From April 15-17, 2018 nearly 1,000 attendees, at all stages of their analytics careers, will travel to Baltimore—the hometown of INFORMS and a vital hub of discovery and growth in Maryland—for the 2018 INFORMS Business Analytics Conference. The conference provides attendees many opportunities to share ideas, to network, and to learn about a range of current topics and trends that can help businesses and organizations improve their analytics prowess by applying science to the art of business.

INFORMS members Mark Ferguson of the University of South Carolina and Beril Toktay of the Georgia Institute of Technology, along with Aris Oraiopoulos of the University of Cambridge discussed the challenges and legalities of extending computer lifespans by refurbishing and reselling, and explored potential solutions.

INFORMS Fellow Brenda Dietrich is the newest addition to the Cornel University Operations Research and Information Engineering faculty as the Arthur ’59, M.S. ‘61 and Helen Geoffrion Professor of Practice.

Three INFORMS members are among those elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 2018: Stephen C Graves of MIT, Ali H Sayed of the University of California, and Jianjun Shi of the Georgia Institute of Technology.

A study published in the INFORMS journal Marketing Science examined the link between Super Bowl viewership across the top advertising markets in the US and corresponding sales in those markets for advertisers brands during the 2006-2011 period. Focusing on the beer and soda categories (top-spending ones as outlined above), the authors estimated in one highlighted finding that “sales of Budweiser can increase as much as 10 six-packs per thousand households for a ten-point increase in ratings during the week leading up to the Super Bowl.” That’s good for Budweiser, which is reportedly now only the 4th-most popular beer in the US.