New Orleans, often referred to as the Isle of Orleans because it is surrounded by Lake Pontchartrain to the north, Lake Borgne to the east and the Mississippi River to the south, is preparing to host the INFORMS Annual Meeting, Nov. 13-16. You won't want to miss this meeting — the exciting academic program and special activities planned by the organizing committee, combined with south Louisiana's mild November climate, world-famous cuisine, music, architecture, art and nightlife, will make this a special event.

The city lies at the center of the U.S. Gulf Coast — these vast wetlands are vital to the state's recreational and agricultural interests as well as its $1 billion+ per year seafood industry. Louisiana's coastal wetlands are a complex and fragile system of coastal marshes, swamps, bayous and estuaries that are teeming with life. According to the U.S. Geological Survey's National Wetlands Research Center, Louisiana's 5,727 square miles of coastal wetlands contain:

• over 50 percent of the tidal marshes found in the lower 48 states;
  
  
• oil and gas pipelines that deliver more than 25 percent of the nation's energy supplies;
  
  
• the world's largest port system; and
  
  
• fisheries that supply more than 25 percent of the seafood consumed in the lower 48 states.

Much of the ongoing and staggering destruction of Louisiana's coastal wetlands is directly attributable to human activities such as dredging wetlands for canals or draining and filling for agriculture, grazing and development. This environmental crisis motivated the selection of the theme for the INFORMS Annual Meeting 2005: "Ecologies, Economies and O.R." The goal of the conference is to introduce OR/MS professionals to this promising research area by highlighting some of the current important problems and ongoing research efforts, as well as providing some direction for future critical research needs.

The meeting will feature a wide variety of exciting events, including:

• several plenary and keynote speakers who will address various aspects of the conference theme, including Luk Van Wassenhove (Henry Ford Chaired Professor of Manufacturing and professor of operations management, INSEAD) and Stuart L. Hart (Samuel C. Johnson Professor of Sustainable Global Enterprise and professor of management at Cornell University);
  
  
• an increased practitioner orientation with several practitioner-oriented sessions (sessions will be clearly marked on the program);
  
  
• several sessions organized around the conference theme (sessions will be clearly marked on the program);
  
  
• a wide range of tutorial sessions that will span the entire conference (see box);
  
  
• research clinic sessions in which practitioners and researchers will present potential research problems for consideration and discussion;
  
  
• lunchtime interactive sessions including posters, media loops on laptops, 3-D models and other creative exhibits;
  
  
• several new topics for invited clusters;
  
  
• sponsored sessions organized by more than 20 subdivisions of INFORMS on topics ranging from auctions and game theory to education to reverse supply chains;
  
  
• Sunday evening welcome reception in the exhibit hall — a great opportunity to meet your colleagues; and
  
  
• general reception on Monday evening at Mardi Gras World (where Mardi Gras floats are designed, built and stored).

The Organizing Committee is very excited about the program for the INFORMS Annual Meeting 2005 in New Orleans. We look forward to seeing you there! For the latest meeting news, go to www.informs.org/Conf/NO2005/.

Tutorial Sessions Organizers of the INFORMS Annual Meeting in New Orleans have planned a wide range of tutorial sessions that will span the entire conference. Tutorial topics include: Branch and Tree Decomposition Techniques for Discrete Optimization Stochastic Programming: Optimization When Uncertainty Matters Next Generation Decision Support Systems for Railroad Planning and Scheduling Defending Critical Infrastructure Demand Selection and Assignment Problems in Supply Chain Planning Decision Analysis = Decision Engineering Operations Research in Experimental Psychology Active Learning for Quantitative Courses A CBC User Guide