News Room

Following a lackluster 2015 holiday shopping season, a recent study in the INFORMS journal Marketing Science provides three tips for holiday shoppers this year: there should be limited instances when they will have to pay for shipping; savings will be spread out throughout the season, not just on Black Friday and Cyber Monday; and outlets are an increasingly viable option to find quality merchandise.

Northwestern University engineering professor and INFORMS member Karen Smilowitz and her team of students will utilize a race-simulation program to produce a real-time model of the race by combining data from previous Chicago marathons with periodic updates from the checkpoints. The system analyzes the information and can predict, for example, where runners will be if the temperature rises dramatically. With this information, personnel can foresee how many runners might seek help at certain aid tents along the course and then transfer volunteers to be where they are needed. 

UCSD professor of mathematics Ruth Williams on Tuesday night was awarded the prestigious John von Neumann Theory Prize, given annually by the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences, for her pioneering research on the theory and applications of “stochastic networks and their diffusion approximations.” Williams, who holds the Charles Lee Powell Endowed Chair in Mathematics, shared the award with Martin Reiman of Columbia University’s department of industrial engineering and operations research. Both researchers accepted their prize of $5,000, a medallion and a citation at an annual INFORMS meeting in Nashville, Tenn. 

PROS, the revenue and profit realization company, announced that members of its Science and Research team – Ravi Kumar, Ph.D., Ang Li, Ph.D, and Wei Wang, Ph.D. – will deliver presentations based on their research at the 2016 INFORMS Annual Meeting in Nashville, Tenn., at the Music City Center. More than 5,000 leading academics, industry experts, INFORMS members, students and government agency representatives are expected to attend.

During the 2016 INFORMS Annual Meeting in Nashville, Steve Roemerman, CEO of Lone Star Analysis presented, "A Multicriteria, Multiplayer Model: The Protest Casino." Mr. Roemerman described simulation and modeling for public policy in Federal acquisitions. His co-author was Randal Allen. The work presented at INFORMS involved modeling competitive behavior among bidders using game theory methods, econometrics, and policy analysis among other academic fields.