Letter from the Co-lead Editors

Fall/Winter 2025 Edition of OR/MS Tomorrow

Dear OR/MS Community Members,

"I think, therefore I am.” This aphorism feels less secure in an age of AI tools. Unlike steam engines and electric motors, which replaced physical eﬀort, today’s systems are designed to augment how we think. As OR/MS practitioners, we help build and analyze these algorithms, so we’re right at the center of this “algorithmic life” we now inhabit. This Christmas break, we’re back with a curated set of articles for our OR/MS community—whether you’re a student growing your network, an early-career professional looking for a path into analytics, or simply trying to make sense of where the technology is headed, there’s something here for you.

We open with an invited article from Maya Balakrishnan, a professor at UT Dallas’s Jindal School of Management and a respected scholar, who reﬂects on the role of humans in the age of AI and argues that the best way to leverage these tools is to understand their limitations and recognize the value of your private information. In the second article, Fernando and Ling gather some of the most common myths about AI and set out to debunk them, while Alina, in the third piece, highlights an important facet of large language models—hallucination—and discusses how it can be reduced. The next article raises a less mainstream but important topic: academic clickbait, examining the thin line between attention-grabbing titles and claims of novelty, and we then detour into practice, looking at how forecasting remains both a simple and rapidly evolving area where, even in the age of LLMs, foundational tools like linear regression still prove remarkably powerful.

We feature two interviews—one with ECPN attendees on how the INFORMS Analytics+ Conference broadens perspectives and builds friendships, and another with Professor Wang and Boakye on sustaining and growing interest in OR/MS through their INFORMS student chapter. We conclude with coverage of the K–12 poster competition at the INFORMS 2025 Annual Meeting. Enjoy this packed issue, and we wish all our readers a Merry Christmas and a very happy New Year in advance.

We would also like to acknowledge the following for their photographic contributions to the front matter of the issue: Maarten van den Heuvel for the Content page image, and Sigmund for the header photo. The cover photo was generated using ChatGPT.

Discover more about OR/MS Tomorrow by visiting our website at www.informs.org/Publications/OR-MS-Tomorrow, where you can access individual articles from this issue, explore past editions, and learn more about our editorial team. If interested in contributing an article for our Fall/Winter 2026 issue, email us at [email protected]. Keep up-to-date with all our news, events, and more by following us on Facebook, X, and LinkedIn!

Happy reading!

Ronak Tiwari