News Releases

CATONSVILLE, MD, October 30, 2017 – From reporting traffic jams using the Waze app to a colony of ants working together to achieve extraordinary feats, examples of crowdsourcing and collective intelligence are all around us. As the problems that we face grow in complexity, the speed and reach of communications and data flow are vastly improving now that just about anyone can act as a consultant on a problem by providing their own individual expertise and information. Analytics can be used to refine this insight from groups to improve solutions to problems in a variety of areas including economics, computer science, biology, communications, political science, and organizational behavior. 

HOUSTON, TX, October 24, 2017 – For the homeless men, women, and children of Houston still struggling in the aftermath of Hurricane Harvey, a helping hand came from an unexpected source –1,000 comfort kits with essential toiletries and hygiene items assembled by the attendees of the INFORMS 2017 Annual Meeting, held in Houston, October 22-25. 

CATONSVILLE, MD, October 18, 2017 – More than 5,600 operations research and analytics professionals and students from around the world will arrive in Houston later this week for the 2017 INFORMS Annual Meeting, doing their part to not only learn and network within their profession, but to help with Houston’s ongoing recovery from Hurricane Harvey. 

CATONSVILLE, MD, October 13, 2017 - INFORMS, the leading international association for operations research and analytics professionals, announced today that Ramayya Krishnan, Ph.D., Dean of Carnegie Mellon University’s Heinz College of Information Systems and Public Policy, has been elected as the 25th President of the INFORMS Board of Directors.

CATONSVILLE, MD, October 12, 2017 - INFORMS congratulates Richard H. Thaler, renowned behavioral economist and researcher, who was awarded the 2017 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for his outstanding contributions to the field of economics. Among the citations prominently featured by the Nobel Prize committee in Professor Thaler’s award was his seminal 1985 paper on his now famous theory of mental accounting, which was published in the INFORMS journal Marketing Science.

CATONSVILLE, MD, October 10, 2017 – In the U.S. today, the majority of professional stock market traders are young males and new evidence suggests biology strongly influences their trading behavior. According to a new study in the INFORMS journal Management Science, this could be a significant contributor to fluctuations in the market, as high testosterone levels can cause these traders to overestimate future stock values and change their trading behavior, leading to dangerous prices bubbles and subsequent crashes.

CATONSVILLE, MD, October 9, 2017 - In 2008, New York City mandated all chain restaurants to post the calories of items on their menus. The intent was to induce consumers to choose healthier items in the restaurant. A forthcoming study in the INFORMS journal Marketing Science, a leading scholarly marketing publication, investigated whether the calorie posting on menus has broader spillovers by impacting consumer evaluations of the restaurant. The study finds that health mentions about the foods increased significantly in online reviews after the calorie posting regulation. The result suggests that calorie posting can not only shift consumers towards healthier alternatives when inside a restaurant, but can also have spillovers on other customers reading the reviews by potentially redirecting them towards healthier restaurants and food items. 

CATONSVILLE, MD, October 4, 2017 – Leaders in industry and academia from around the world are among those who will be joining the INFORMS Board of Directors in 2018. INFORMS, the leading international association for operations research and analytics professionals, today announced the newest members elected to its BOD, which is comprised of the leading minds in both the academic and industry sectors of operations research (O.R.) and analytics. 

CATONSVILLE, MD, October 2, 2017 – The Certified Analytics Professional (CAP®) program, the only global professional certification for analytics practitioners, has been accredited by the American National Standards Institute (ANSI), the American member of the International Organization for Standardization (ISO), furthering its distinction to what CIO Magazine earlier this year called one of the top “big data certifications that will payoff.”

CATONSVILLE, MD, September 27, 2017 – Medical device manufacturing plants in the U.S. can experience 100 fewer product recalls per year, or a decrease of 20 percent,  if the FDA investigators who inspect these plants are placed on a rotating schedule, according to a new study in the INFORMS journal Manufacturing & Service Operations Management.