OR/MS Today - April 2000

April 2000

INFORMS News

Korea Meeting Preview

MIT Dean, Samsung CEO to Keynote INFORMS/KORMS

It is highly befitting that the dean of the world's foremost engineering school and the CEO of the largest DRAM manufacturer in the world will deliver the keynote addresses for the INFORMS/KORMS conference, whose theme is "Information and Knowledge Management in the 21st Century." The conference will be held in Seoul in June of this year. More than 700 abstracts have been submitted thus far for the conference and the organizing committee expects that the conference will be the largest international academic conference ever held in Korea.

Tom Magnanti is the dean of the School of Engineering at MIT, and is the past president of INFORMS as well as a former president of ORSA. He has served as the editor in chief of Operations Research. He was a founding co-director of MIT's noted Leaders for Manufacturing Program as well as of its System Design and Management Program, and has co-directed MIT's interdepartmental Operations Research Center. Tom's research and teaching focus on the theory and application of large-scale optimization, particularly in the areas of network flows and combinatorial optimization.

He has conducted research on such topics as production planning and scheduling, transportation planning, facility location, logistics and communication systems design. Tom is a recipient of the ORSA Kimball Medal for distinguished service and the 1993 Lanchester Prize for best publication in the field of operations research."

Magnanti's address is entitled "The E-World of Engineering, Education and the Electronics Revolution."

Yun Chong-Yun, the president and CEO of Samsung Electronic Company, will deliver the second keynote address. According to the Dec. 20, 1999 issue of Business Week International, Mr. Yun is "spearheading what may well be a revolution in Korean industry." Since becoming CEO in January of 1997, he has transformed the company into one of the most profitable industrial giants in the world. He has refocused the company's business model from market share to profitability and instituted just-in-time supply chain management with a single computer network to link all of the company's production, marketing and distribution units which led to more than $3 billion savings in inventory and accounts receivable costs alone in 1997.

Reflecting the theme of the conference, tutorials and workshops will focus on the applications of information technology for e-commerce, e-business and supply chain management. John D.C. Little of MIT, who was the first president of INFORMS, will present a tutorial on "OR/MS and E-Commerce," a subject he teaches at MIT. Haim Mendelson of Stanford will deliver a tutorial on "Electronic Business and Commerce — Issues and Research Challenge" in which he will classify e-commerce business models, discuss the nature of the problems that arise in this area, and present the research approach taken by Stanford's Center for Electronic Business and Commerce, which he directs.

Chaiho Kim of Santa Clara University will present a tutorial on "Data Webhousing," a process of collecting clickstream data from web browsers, transforming and loading them into web enabled data marts, and building data models suitable for data mining for decision support and customer relationship management. He teaches a course on data warehousing and data mining at Santa Clara University.

Steve Nahmias of Santa Clara University is organizing a panel on "E-Business Supply Chain Management." Panel members will include Dorit Hochbaum of University of California at Berkeley, who heads the E-Commerce Initiative for the Haas School of Business at Berkeley; Candance Yano, chairperson of IEOR at Berkeley; and Naren Agrawal of Santa Clara University, who heads the supply chain area in the executive MBA program at the university.

The conference will include many invited and contributed technical papers dealing with applications of information technology for e-commerce, telecommunications and supply chain management. The program committee has scheduled 14 sessions on e-commerce and e-business, six sessions on telecommunications and seven sessions on supply chain management. Examples of technical papers on e-commerce and e-business include: "Factors Affecting Banner-Clicking on the WWW," "Visualization of Web Navigation," "Targeting Banner Adverting on the Web," "A Study on Analyzing the Influence of CRM in a B-to-B Market Place," "E-Commerce: A New Competition Paradigm in Brazil," "iCash: Internet Cash," "A Web-Based System for Customer Knowledge" and others.

Focused clusters discussing applications in accounting, finance, health care, marketing and strategic management are also featured. Many other sessions covering a wide range of management science topics such as optimization, inventory management and production scheduling have also been organized.

The organizing committee would like to welcome you to this conference, which will be held June 18-21. A number of exciting plant tours and site visits have been planned for the attendees. Additional information about the conference can be found on the conference web site at http://informs.scu.edu/seoul/.

— Narendra Agrawal, program co-chair

Table of Contents

OR/MS Today Home Page

Lionheart Publishing, Inc.
506 Roswell Street, Suite 220, Marietta, GA 30060, USA
Phone: 770-431-0867 | Fax: 770-432-6969
E-mail: lpi@lionhrtpub.com
URL: http://www.lionhrtpub.com