Posted: 6/15/03
Operations Research in the News
Compiled by Barry List
The INFORMS Practice Meeting in Phoenix last May saw new strides in the campaign to market the OR profession. Following a report to the INFORMS Board of Directors by president Tom Cook and representatives of marketing firm PJA, those attending the conference gathered to discuss the need to bring recognition to OR. In an informal discussion group on a cool Arizona evening, INFORMS members exchanged ideas about ways of bringing attention to OR internally within companies and via the media. In an INFORMS Roundtable workshop the next day, ILOG's Irv Lustig and panelists debuted a PowerPoint presentation created in collaboration with the INFORMS PR Department.
The presentation helps OR practitioners explain their capabilities to a new client, bid on an internal project or introduce OR to newcomers. An ad introducing the INFORMS Corporate Outreach Presentation appears on page 13 in this issue. To download the presentation, point your browser to www.informs.org/press and click on the link at the top of the page.
Recent articles in the press examined the contributions made by operations researchers in IT, sports forecasting and fighting the war on terror.
War on Terrorism
Planning the best response to an anthrax attack on a U.S. city is the subject of a study by Lawrence M. Wein, editor in chief of the INFORMS journal Operations Research, Yale's Edward H. Kaplan, the recipient of the 2002 INFORMS Presidents Award, and David L. Craft of the MIT Operations Research Center. Their recommendations could reduce fatalities by a substantial percentage. Their study appears in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Online articles about the study appear at Science Daily and CNN.
In an earlier study published by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, the three operations researchers authored a report on mass smallpox inoculation to combat a potential biological attack on the United States. Articles appeared in USA Today, and the story was covered by MSNBC and in a "Today Show" interview with Katie Couric.
Dance Card
Want a jump on who's headed to the NCAA tournament? Two university professors can help.
Using a complicated formula and computer software, they say they can all but predict which men's college basketball teams will be happy today.
"Every year we look at it and ask if this is the year it's going to screw up,'" said Jay Coleman, an operations management professor at the University of North Florida. "We keep our fingers crossed."
He and research partner Allen Lynch, who teaches economics at Mercer University in Georgia, developed the formula.
"Dance Card,'' as they named it, accurately predicted 63 of the 65 teams invited to the national tournament last year (Missouri and Wyoming were overlooked). In 2001, the program hit on 64 of 65 (believe it or not, Missouri was the team that fooled 'em)...
The "Dance Card'' formula was published in the May-June 2001 issue of Interfaces, a journal of the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences.
— Associated Press, March 16, 2003
Mortality Rate
Using information technology may lead to lower patient mortality rates and increased profitability in the hospital sector, according to findings published in Management Science, a journal of the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS). Researchers found that higher usage levels of a decision support system were associated with quality and profitability benefits. The findings indicate that a hospital could increase revenues by over $140 per patient if managers executed and used the analysis from 10 additional decision support systems reports per month, said co-author Rajiv Kohli of the University of Notre Dame.
— Alcoholism & Drug Abuse Weekly, May 5, 2003
Barry List is the director of public relations at INFORMS.
OR/MS Today copyright © 2003 by the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences.
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