Note: Arash was one of my students in my Fall 2009 communications course. Here's an interesting post of his experience at INFORMS.
The Conference Experience: INFORMS Annual Meeting 2009
During what proved to be the busiest week of my first semester at Heinz MISM program so far, I spent about two and a half days out of town - well, just a few thousand miles out. On Monday, October 12th, I went to San Diego, CA to attend the annual conference of the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS) and present my own work as well. Having already taken a midterm and a final exam the previous week, I had to reschedule another pair to be able to attend the conference - thanks to the understanding of the two course instructors. So, I had to study for two exams and an assignment, attend the conference and give my talk, and have overnight flights. When I arrived in Pittsburgh on Thursday morning and handed in the assignment, I felt really exhausted. However, I believe the conference was worth the hard time because of the wonderful opportunity and experience I gained.
According to its website[1], “the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS) is the largest professional society in the world for professionals in the field of operations research (OR). It was established in 1995 with the merger of the Operations Research Society of America (ORSA) and The Institute of Management Sciences (TIMS).” The Annual Meeting is held in mid-October of each year and its sessions encompass a variety of fields such as Applied Probability, Computing, Decision Analysis, Information Systems, Manufacturing & Service Operations Management, Marketing, Optimization, Simulation, and Transportation Science and Logistics, sometimes even going beyond what you would generally consider to be in OR domain. With both invited and contributing speakers, more than 1000 sessions are held during four days - this year, October 11-14 - and usually three to five talks are scheduled for each 90-minute session. Furthermore, there are keynote speeches and plenary sessions given by outstanding, highly-achieved individuals in the above areas.
I spent most of Tuesday finalizing my slides and practicing my talk. I also visited the exhibit hall and talked to a few company representatives, who had stayed after Sunday’s big job fair, about their summer internships and submitted my resume. Unfortunately, most of them told me they have not figured out their summer plans yet. There was also a reception dinner on Tuesday night, which was a great opportunity to meet many people from different fields. I made some new connections and exchanged a few business cards.
Another thing to mention about that day - and this, I imagine, would be interesting to people in the School of Public Policy and Management - was the astonishing keynote on the very important issue of climate change, delivered by famous John D. Sterman of Sloan School of Management at MIT, who is also the director of System Dynamics Group over there. He talked about “the failure of scientists to understand how policymakers and citizens think,” and its result being, “our models are often ignored.” He discussed how erroneous mental models which people have in their minds about climate change simply leads to underestimating the urgency of cutting greenhouse gas emissions. Also, he presented simulation models that everyone could use to understand, and maybe predict, the effects of policy proposals in this area. Not surprisingly, the models are already being used by senior policymakers in US and other countries.
My own presentation, scheduled for Wednesday, was about online advertisements in social networking web sites, specifically Facebook. Starting in summer, I had done a survey of a few hundred Facebook users to get their opinions on how to target the ads more efficiently. Based on this survey, I derived some conclusions on what types of data the advertisers could use and which users are best to target ads at to get more views and/or more clicks. It was my first out-of-classroom presentation and I was the first speaker of the session. Although a bit nervous in the beginning, I guess I had a fairly good performance overall. I managed to answer a few questions from the audience as well. Great experience after all! There were three other speakers in my session: Dennis Ahrholdt, a German PhD student presenting his work on Trust Enhancing IT-signals in e-tailing; Jan Edman, a professor from Stockholm School of Economics talking about blogging in business world; and Zsolt Ugray, a professor from Utah State University explaining “why simpler websites perform better” in online retail sales.
In addition to many advantages, there were a couple of downsides in this conference for me. First of all, I missed the first two days of the conference, including a number of great talks as well as the main job fair organized by INFORMS Job Placement Services[2]. Additionally, due to my very busy schedule, I could not attend any sessions except the one I had my talk in. Yet, I have gained huge benefits from the conference and would certainly recommend it to other students who are interested in any of the related areas.
Here is a link to the conference website in which you can read as much as you like about the event and related news. They have also uploaded many photos on the website:
