Leading the Pack
Brenda L. Dietrich, former INFORMS president who leads the data science function of IBM Business Analytics Insights as a Service unit, was named as one of the top nine women leading the pack in data analytics.
Announcing the results of the 2026 INFORMS Board of Directors election and the new board for 2027.
INFORMS has named 12 distinguished leaders as the 2026 class of INFORMS Fellows, one of the highest honors in the profession.
Most medical devices do not hit the market through rigorous safety testing but by being deemed similar enough to something already approved—the “predicate” device through a mechanism known as the FDA’s 510(k) pathway. But similar is not a synonym for safe. While the assumption may be that substantial equivalence is a reasonable stand-in for a safety review, a share of devices cleared with this method still get recalled, and the FDA spends valuable time reviewing devices the same way, regardless of how risky it is on paper.
An audio journey of how data and analytics save lives, save money and solve problems.

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Brenda L. Dietrich, former INFORMS president who leads the data science function of IBM Business Analytics Insights as a Service unit, was named as one of the top nine women leading the pack in data analytics.
By studying nearly nine million domestic flights, INFORMS members Mazhar Arikan, University of Kansas; Vinayak Deshpande, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; and Mark Ferguson, University of South Carolina, found that by not charging checked bag fees Southwest Airlines could be impacting their flights' ability to depart on time. Their findings were published in the INFORMS journal Management Science.
The LA Times explores garbage orbiting earth and how to clean it up, including a 2009 paper by INFORMS member Lawrence Wein and coauthor Andrew Bradley, both researchers at Stanford University.
Two INFORMS members from the University of Iowa’s Tippie College of Business, doctoral student Bhupesh Shetty and Associate Professor Jeffrey Ohlmann, in conjunction with Professor Gary Gaeth, developed an optimization model to improve Monday Night Football schedules. By analyzing every Monday night game played between 1993 and 2008, the researchers discovered three factors that have the greatest impact on generating high ratings: games played by Super Bowl champions, teams with high profile players or coaches joining the team, and teams with high-powered offenses.
Using data from a Washington Post comprehensive report, two INFORMS members investigated the impact of technology on police performance and practice. Professors Min-Seok Pang and Paul Pavlou, both from Temple University’s Fox School of Business, found that the use of analytics and smartphones to access intelligence led to decreased instances of lethal force by police, whereas wearable video cameras were linked to an increase in lethal force on civilians by police.

OR/MS Today is the INFORMS member magazine that shares the latest research and best practices in operations research, analytics and the management sciences.
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Analytics magazine showcases articles and research reports based on big data, AI, machine learning, data analytics and other new-age technologies.
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