The weather here in Pittsburgh is finally feeling more like winter: it is a dreary, windy day, with intermittent snow. I suspect it will only get worse over the next two months.
Fortunately I know a cure for the winter blues: Optimization! Optimization with the INFORMS crowd, that is, at the Fourth INFORMS Optimization Society Conference, February 24-26, 2012. I’ll be there (I’m the co-chair, so attendance is kinda expected) and I think there is a great slate of plenary and special presentations:
- Jeralt Ault from the University of Miami on using analytics for managing fisheries,
- Manoj Saxena from IBM on aspects of Watson,
- Dimitris Bertsimis from MIT on analytics in sports,
- Suvrajeet Sen from Ohio State on stochastic mixed integer programs,
- Dave Alderson from NPS on attacker-defender modeling
(all these are my gloss on the topic: formal titles and abstracts are coming soon).
Nothing like a bit of optimization to make the world a bit brighter!
If you’d like to submit an abstract for this conference, get a move on: the due date is January 6, 2012. Abstracts are short (300 characters) so it shouldn’t take much time to put something together.
Oh, and the conference will be in Miami, which might also do some good for getting away from the winter for many of us.
Thanks for spreading the word, Mike! 🙂 and Happy New Year to you, Ilona and Alexander!