OMEGA RHO® International Honor Society for Operations Research and Management Science - The Honor Society of INFORMS
Founded in 1976 and formally a part of INFORMS since 1998, OMEGA RHO® is a Member of the Association of College Honor Societies and a foundation for excellence in Operations Research and Management Science disciplines.
OMEGA RHO® DISTINGUISHED LECTURE 2023
Reflections on the Profession of Operations Research and Some Thoughts on its Future
In this lecture, we will reflect on the speaker’s 40+ years of experience in operations research, including such notable milestones as the merger of ORSA and TIMS, the Science of Better marketing campaign, the analytics movement, the emergence of big data and data science, and now the realization of artificial intelligence. What did we get right and what were the missed opportunities? We will reflect on the past, suggest some key learnings, and share some ideas on how the profession and INFORMS can thrive in the future.
Jeff Camm - Wake Forest University
OMEGA RHO® DISTINGUISHED LECTURE 2022
Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Universities
Artificial intelligence (AI) leveraging multiple data sources and input modalities (tabular data, computer vision, and natural language) is poised to become a viable method to deliver more accurate results and deployable pipelines across various applications. This work proposes and evaluates a unified Holistic AI in Medicine (HAIM), Agriculture, Meteorology, and Law. We show that our proposed framework can consistently and robustly produce models that outperform similar single-source approaches across all these applications. We also quantify the contribution of each modality and data source using Shapley values, demonstrating the importance of heterogeneity in data type and the necessity of multimodal inputs across different fields. Our Holistic AI framework's generalizable properties and flexibility could offer a promising pathway for future multimodal predictive systems in various applications. Throughout their entire history, universities have been organized along distinct departments. I outline what I expect will be the impact of these developments on how universities will be organized in the following decades and how OR/MS can play a leading role.
(Left to right)
Dimitris Bertsimas - MIT, and Chun-An (Joe) Chou - Northeastern University
OMEGA RHO® DISTINGUISHED LECTURE 2021
A Journey Through Public Sector Operations Research
Societally important problems have driven the theory and application of operations research since its origins in World War II. Recent events have highlighted the enormous number of challenges that require expertise from operations research and analytics. The operations research community has a long history of stepping up to address challenging problems in the public sector through modeling, computation, and data analytics that has influenced policy and impacted practice. This has been a central theme of my academic career, which has focused on security, emergency response, public safety, and risk management. This talk discusses several research problems, focusing on how operations research has made a difference, and offers a blueprint for how the operations research community can tackle future challenges, impact society, and broadcast our message to the world.
Laura Albert - University of Wisconsin- Madison
OMEGA RHO® DISTINGUISHED LECTURE 2020
Operations Research and Public Policy: Making a Difference
Our nation and the world have undergone an enormous number of societal changes in 2020 that will impact our lives well into the future. This has created an even greater need for data-driven analysis and modeling to address a growing list of new challenges. Operations research has a long history of impacting public policy, in such diverse areas as the military, homeland security, government, and public health. Several of these issues have been central themes throughout my academic career, including risk-based aviation security, election forecasting, and computational redistricting. This talk discusses a number of these research problems, focusing on how operations research has made a difference, and how the operations research community can provide valuable service to our nation by using our expertise to address emerging opportunities in this new world.
Sheldon Jacobson - Founder Professor of Computer Science
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
OMEGA RHO® DISTINGUISHED LECTURE 2019
The Parametric Self-Dual Simplex Method — A Modern Perspective
The parametric self-dual simplex method (PSD) dates back to George Dantzig's classic book published in 1963. Other variants of the simplex method have dominated the world of optimization over the years but the PSD variant has lots of attractive features both from an educational perspective and in the world of applications. In the talk I will define the method, discuss how it helps one understand more deeply duality theory and algorithm complexity and I will discuss some application areas including portfolio selection problems and LAD-Lasso problems that arise in modern machine learning problems.
(Left to right)
Robert Vanderbei - Princeton University, W. Art Chaovalitwongse - University of Arkansas)
Dr. Margaret Brandeau was presented with her Honorary Omega Rho® membership by President Tugrul Daim