OR/MS Today - April 1998 - INFORMS Online

April 1998

INFORMS Online:
Navigating a National Meeting

By Michael Trick

For many INFORMS members, the semi-annual national meetings are highlights of their professional year. These meetings offer a chance to communicate with peers; find out about current research; shop for books, software and other professional materials; and visit a new and interesting city. National conferences can also be somewhat intimidating, due to their large size and multitude of choices.

INFORMS Online makes navigating a national meeting much easier. In fact, IOL has a role to play throughout the conference cycle.

For most of those attending conferences, preparation begins six months before the event. At that time, abstracts are prepared for submission to the contributed sessions, and initial decisions are made whether to attend the conference.

Approximately six months from now - October 1998 - the INFORMS national meeting will be in Seattle, Wash. Our initial conference site is already in place at http://www.informs.org/Conf/Seattle98. This site contains the Call for Papers and a mechanism for submitting contributed abstracts through our secure server (see last month's column for comments on Internet security). This site also contains a pointer to the organizers' page. Different conference organizers do different things on their pages, but these pages always contain information on hotels, restaurants and local activities by those who know best: those who live in the area.

After the Contributed Paper deadline, the next milestone occurs approximately three months before the conference. This is the time that the initial conference bulletin appears online. This bulletin initially features a tentative schedule of presentation and session titles. During the following month, the schedule is finalized, and abstracts to all the papers are added.

With the Montréal conference being held at the end of April, the first online bulletin appeared at the beginning of February at http://www.informs.org/Conf/Montreal98. By the end of February, the site contained all of the information that will be available in Montréal in the full bulletin. Additionally, online pre-registration is available, again using our secure server. Printable forms are available for those who choose not to register online.

I find the online bulletin much more useful than the printed one. The primary advantage of the online version is that it is completely searchable. For instance, a colleague and I have started research related to call center employee scheduling - a field about which I know very little. It is a simple matter to do a search on "call AND center" to find all presentations that cover call centers. Further searches on "workforce AND scheduling" and "staff AND scheduling" give me a good idea about what is being presented.

Furthermore, the presentations are grouped in many ways. I am a member of the Computer Science Technical Section, and am interested in which talks are sponsored by that group. Presentations are divided by sponsoring group, so one click is sufficient to bring up all such presentations. Presentations are also available by cluster and author.

Another advantage of the online bulletin is the chance to make a "personalized bulletin" consisting of only the talks I am considering attending. This setup is available for Montréal as http://www.informs.org/Conf/Montreal98/sessions_frame.html. At this site, I can click on the sessions in which I am interested. When I click "Create My Bulletin," I get only those sessions in a nicely formatted page which I can then print, e-mail to myself or save in a file.

We are working to make the system even more useful. Starting with the Montréal meeting, we are requesting URLs with abstract submissions, and allowing people to add URLs to the online bulletin. These pointers to authors, papers or presentations will give prospective attendees more information on presentations.

More knowledge on the presentation before it is made should result in an even more useful conference. We also have been placing online items of particular interest to segments of the membership. For instance, some recent conferences have included a "Guide for Professionals" - a summary of features of the conference of particular interest to those who apply OR/MS techniques. IOL's services do not end once the conference is over.

Conference pages remain online and are indexed by most of the major web indexing services. This lets people know about the research we do at a very wide scale. Furthermore, all conferences - since Philadelphia 1990 - are indexed in a Meetings Database (http://www.informs.org/Biblio/Meetings.html) that contains more than 20,000 presentations, fully indexed by author, title and words in abstract.

What's New at INFORMS Online

http://www.informs.org/Conf/Montreal98

http://www.informs.org/Press

As always, please feel free to contact me (trick@cmu.edu) on any aspect of INFORMS Online.

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