Media Coverage

Media articles featuring INFORMS members in the news.

Most Recent Media Coverage

Topic

Portfolios and Their Debt to an O.R. Nobel Winner

December 18, 2015

During WWII, academics developed “Operations Research” techniques involving statistics and linear programming to hunt enemy submarines, supply troops on the ground and deliver ordnance to targets. Soon after the war ended, Operations Research academics began to apply their methodologies to investing. In 1952 Harry Markowitz, a graduate student at the University of Chicago, published a paper on portfolio selection in the Journal of Finance. Markowitz’s quantitative approach to investment theory was radically different from the conventional stock market wisdom at the time, which focused on picking winning stocks and concentrating stock holdings to maximize return. Investors knew that holding stocks meant taking risks, and they were led to believe that the only way to reduce risk was to become more competent at picking stocks. Some investors were following the advice of Gerald M. Loeb, the co-founder of brokerage firm E.F. Hutton, who wrote “once you obtain competency, diversification is undesirable.” Markowitz’s work along with others gave birth to what is now known as Modern Portfolio Theory (MPT). MPT provided investors quantitative ways to reduce risk and optimize their return.

INFORMS CAP Certification #1

December 17, 2015

While you’ll have to determine your own goals and certification needs, let’s look at a handful of important and valuable certifications all IT professionals should consider earning.

  1. Certified Analytics Professional

CAP certification enables you to understand the entire analytics process. From framing business and analytic problems to deployment and model lifecycle management, you’ll have full knowledge of everything that goes into general analytics by the time you finish this certification process.

Management Science Makes List of Top 25 STEM Majors

December 9, 2015

Finding the optimal way to use a workforce is not an art — it’s a science. In small groups a missing employee can cause sleepless nights when deadlines approach, while an extra employee can result in missed performance metrics. In large groups, such as Fortune 500 companies, these same problems can cost a company billions of dollars or result in thousands of lost jobs. Management science applies the principles of mathematics to the modern office to streamline processes, cut costs and grow revenue.

Social media as force multiplier

December 7, 2015

This notion of collaborative expertise makes me consider my own profession. I come from an Air Force community culturally dominated by Operations Research, a discipline “employing techniques from other mathematical sciences, such as mathematical modeling, statistical analysis, and mathematical optimization” to arrive “at optimal or near-optimal solutions to complex decision-making problems.” This is a relatively young and inherently cross disciplinary field, with all the depth-and-breadth-balance problems that entails, that grew out of efforts by scientists, mathematicians, computer scientists, etc., to solve operational problems in World War II. These were, however, experts (in some cases luminaries) in their respective fields, and together they were able to do incredible things that might have been impossible for any subset to accomplish on their own. Social networking is one way to access and connect that kind of expertise.

Syngenta Outlines Edelman Winning Research in Agriculture

Swiss-owned Syngenta, which has a major presence in North America, celebrated a major award at Iowa State University Nov. 13 calling for a math revolution in agriculture.

Attended by plant breeders, ag graduate students and college faculty at the Scheman Building on ISU's campus, Syngenta officials explained how it has incorporated advanced analytics into its soybean breeding procedures with assistance from ISU faculty and others.

The team's success won Syngenta the 2015 Franz Edelman Award for achievement in operations research and the management sciences in mid-April.

Media Contact

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INFORMS
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Healthcare

Sheldon H. Jacobson and Dr. Janet A. Jokela: Should you be concerned about mpox?

Sheldon H. Jacobson and Dr. Janet A. Jokela: Should you be concerned about mpox?

Chicago Tribune, October 7, 2024

Mpox is spreading across several African countries. The World Health Organization declared mpox a “public health emergency of international concern.” The Democratic Republic of Congo has been hardest hit, though Burundi has also seen a recent surge of cases. To date this year, 36,000 suspected cases have been reported, with more than one-half among children younger than 15 years old. In Burundi alone, two-thirds of the recent cases have been in those younger than 19.

Supply Chain

De-risking global supply chains: Looking beyond material flows

De-risking global supply chains: Looking beyond material flows

Hinrich Foundation, October 29, 2024

Global supply chains are undergoing an irrevocable shift. While material flows remain critical, they are only the most visible aspect of this transition. Beneath the surface, changes in information exchanges, financial reconfigurations, and human capital movements are posing far greater risks to the benefits of global trade. The US, China, and the rest the world must handle these changes with care and perspective.

The Impact of Weather on the Supply Chain

The Impact of Weather on the Supply Chain

Parcel, October 2, 2024

The supply chain for many small parcel shipping companies is typically long. Products are often made in distant lands, travel on oceans and waterways, arrive at ports, are then transported to warehouses, from where a third-party logistics provider delivers the product to its intended destination. In a stable world, shippers and customers alike can expect a product to be delivered within the promised time window. However, in a world facing high levels of uncertainty caused by war, pandemic, political instability, raw material shortages, freak accidents (recall the regional and national impact of the bridge collapse in the Port of Baltimore caused by a container ship), and weather, the shipper must work overtime to ensure customer expectations are met at no additional cost, despite these uncertainties.

Climate