OR/MS Today - February 2000

February 2000

Salt Lake City: Undiscovered Secret

By Bill Giauque

The INFORMS Spring 2000 meeting will be held May 7-10 in Salt Lake City in the Salt Palace Convention Center. Three adjoining hotels — the Marriott, Wyndham and Shilo Inn — are available for accommodations. All are located in the heart of downtown Salt Lake City, within convenient walking distance to two malls and several excellent restaurants. Temple Square, with excellent visitor attractions and gardens, is a few blocks away, and several other attractions are within comfortable walking distance or can be reached easily by public transportation.

Salt Lake City is rich in culture and history, offering spectacular mountain sights, skiing, golf, brew pubs, four-star dining, symphony, choirs, theater and art galleries. While close to the desert, the city is actually situated between two spectacular mountain ranges, the Oquirrhs to the west and the Wasatch to the east, with peaks rising to 11,000 feet.

Unique natural and historic attractions include the Great Salt Lake, early copper and gold mines, ghost towns and Temple Square in the heart of Salt Lake City. You can discover why the seagull is Utah's state bird. More extensive tours of Utah include national parks and monuments that are within a one-day drive from the city, all offering some of the most spectacular scenery in the country. More information on all these attractions is available at the conference web site, which can be found by following the Salt Lake meeting links at www.informs.org.

A guest tour to a broadcast session of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir at Temple Square and Salt Lake City tour is scheduled for May 7. A plant tour to MSL Corporation, manufacturer of the Palm Pilot, is planned for May 8.

As was the case with the past two meetings, the Salt Lake conference has program and paper information available online. Materials received before mid-January will appear on the initial online preliminary program, while papers received subsequently will be added during weekly updates. Papers received after March 15 will be appended weekly to the online program and appear in an addendum to the Final Program.

We anticipate the usual full slate of contributed, sponsored and special (invited) papers. We are particularly excited by the opportunity of presenting a special cluster on simulation software and practice organized by Charles Harrell, one of the founders of ProModel.

The Second Teaching Effectiveness Colloquium (TEC II) will run from May 5 through May 7, and will feature several sessions and workshops on innovative approaches to teaching and improving effectiveness.

The first meeting of INFORMS in the new millennium is a natural time to look back and forward. It is a time to look back to the more than half-century of substantive accomplishment. It is difficult to think of a field that has not been transformed in important ways by our profession. It is time to look forward to the theoretic and practical challenges posed by an increasingly interdependent world, and determine how to best use the computational and theoretical tools that are now available or on the horizon.

Keynote speakers include Gene Woolsey, Tom Magnanti and Governor Michael Leavitt. Woolsey is one of the prime movers in addressing issues of relevance and practical applications in the OR/MS field, and a past president of the Operations Research Society of America. Woolsey is also an unusually entertaining and thought-provoking speaker, and is an ideal person to review where we have been and where we, as a profession, are going.

Tom Magnanti is well known to INFORMS members as the outgoing president of the society. He is also regarded as one of the leading researchers and educators in the country, having recently been named dean of the Engineering School at MIT. He has had a profound impact on education as one of the major developers and leaders of MIT's Leaders for Manufacturing and the Systems Designs and Management Programs, a member of the National Research Council's manufacturing studies board, and a member of several university advisory boards. Magnanti is ideally suited to provide a vision for the next few years for OR/MS.

The Honorable Michael Leavitt, governor of Utah, is one of the major forces behind distance education, particularly the Western Governor's University, an experiment in providing degree-granting, high-quality education through non-traditional means, including the Internet. An engaging and interesting speaker, Gov. Leavitt can provide a unique perspective on an increasingly important method of education.

The 21st Omega Rho Distinguished Lecture will be presented by Edward H. Kaplan from Yale University. Professor Kaplan's research has been reported on the front pages of several prestigious national magazines and newspapers, and in person on both public and commercial television news shows. The author of more than 80 research articles, Professor Kaplan received both the Lanchester Prize and the Edelman Award, the two top honors in the operations research field. He has also twice received the prestigious Lady Davis Visiting Profes-sorship at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where he has investigated AIDS policy issues facing the State of Israel. Professor Kaplan's work remains on the cutting edge of a societal issue that is extremely important — AIDS research. He was just appointed to a committee that gives guidance with respect to the HIV prevention strategy that should be employed (i.e., What should the national plan look like?) to the Centers for Disease Control and the Department of Health and Human Services. An analysis of the committee's results, issues of resource allocation and the general status of how operations researchers have contributed to this important and controversial area should be a most appropriate and worthwhile plenary session.

We look forward to meeting you at Salt Lake City, and helping you take full advantage of the personal and professional opportunities of the spring 2000 INFORMS meeting.

Still time for Abstracts

There's still time to submit an abstract for the Salt Lake City meeting. The online program allows INFORMS to extend the submission deadline through April 1. Go to www.informs.org and follow the links to the meeting. To organize a complete session or cluster, contact conference chair Bill Giauque at william_giauque@byu.edu; phone: (801) 378-2409.

Bill Giauque is the general chairman of INFORMS Salt Lake City Spring 2000.

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