Greetings from Washington

I am at the Washington INFORMS and have just come back from the first session (on experiences with COIN-OR).  Sixty-eight parallel tracks!  Looks like there might be 5000 people at this conference.  It is amazing how big the conference has become.  I was on the INFORMS Board around 2000 when the decision was made to go from two conferences/year (a holdover from the ORSA/TIMS and TIMS/ORSA conferences before the societies merged in 1994) to just one.  At the time, we were getting 1500-1800 people per conference.  The discussion was “Maybe we could get 2400 people if we ran just one conference”.  No one was bold enough to suggest our yearly count would reach 3000-3600, let alone grow enormously!  But INFORMS is the one place to go where you know you will see most or all of your colleagues every year.  While I prefer smaller conferences, this is still a must-go-to event, simply for the mix of people to see.

Weather in Washington is beautiful and the conference hotel, while huge, seems to work, so this is shaping up to be a great conference.

On the blogging front, the ICS (INFORMS Computing Society) blog has posted from the conference, and I expect others to appear shortly.  If you are at the conference, don’t forget to drop by the COIN-OR booth (Booth 504) this evening (Sunday) around 8 to say hi to the blog-ORs!  And stop off to see Steve Baker, author of the Numerati.