News Room

Despite the widespread popularity of online social network platforms, privacy remains a troublesome issue. A new study from the Naveen Jindal School of Management. The researchers used data obtained from Facebook to test the relationship between privacy controls and disclosure patterns of Facebook users based on two popular content-sharing activities: wall posts and private messages. assesses the impact of Facebook’s granular privacy controls and its effects on user disclosure behavior.

Following a lackluster 2015 holiday shopping season, a recent study in the INFORMS journal Marketing Science provides three tips for holiday shoppers this year: there should be limited instances when they will have to pay for shipping; savings will be spread out throughout the season, not just on Black Friday and Cyber Monday; and outlets are an increasingly viable option to find quality merchandise.

Northwestern University engineering professor and INFORMS member Karen Smilowitz and her team of students will utilize a race-simulation program to produce a real-time model of the race by combining data from previous Chicago marathons with periodic updates from the checkpoints. The system analyzes the information and can predict, for example, where runners will be if the temperature rises dramatically. With this information, personnel can foresee how many runners might seek help at certain aid tents along the course and then transfer volunteers to be where they are needed. 

UCSD professor of mathematics Ruth Williams on Tuesday night was awarded the prestigious John von Neumann Theory Prize, given annually by the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences, for her pioneering research on the theory and applications of “stochastic networks and their diffusion approximations.” Williams, who holds the Charles Lee Powell Endowed Chair in Mathematics, shared the award with Martin Reiman of Columbia University’s department of industrial engineering and operations research. Both researchers accepted their prize of $5,000, a medallion and a citation at an annual INFORMS meeting in Nashville, Tenn.