The following presentations may interest reporters --
Internet's 'Father' Honored on 30th Anniversary
- INFORMS President's Award, Monday, 10 - 11 AM. UCLA Professor Leonard Kleinrock, one of thegroup of luminaries who pioneered the ARPANET project that led to today's Internet, will be honored in this 30th anniversary year of the Internet's invention.
Air Disasters: Is It Safe to Fly?
- Aviation Safety in Numbers, Sunday, November 7, 1999, 4:45 P.M. - 6:00 P.M., with Arnold I. Barnett, MIT. A leading expert in airline safety considers the risk of commercial air travel from many perspectives: specific threats such as terrorism, collision risk, and bad weather; the objective death risk in different settings; misconceptions of various kinds about risk; and public perceptions about safety and their effects on actual flying behavior.
E-Commerce & Ketchup
- Repeat Buying in Cyberspace, Monday 8:15 - 9:45 AM, with Peter Fader, Wharton School, and Bruce G. S. Hardie, London Business School. The authors, who developed a model of repeat buying behavior for a major Internet retailer, warn that Web business people count too heavily on a limited number of newcomers visiting their sites. E-commerce's resemblance to traditional supermarket checkout sales is startling. Local angle
Happy 85th Birthday
- Math Pioneer, Monday, 11:30 AM - 5 PM. One of the century's great mathematicians, Stanford Professor Emeritus George B. Dantzig, is honored by the MIT Dean of Engineering and other disciples. Photo opportunities: 11:30 AM, 4:30 PM.
Teaching Our Children Math
- Workshop for Area Math and Science Teachers, Monday 8 AM - 4 PM. "Math you can use" is the focus of this training session for dozens of local teachers. Local angle.
IBM Wins Technology Prize
- INFORMS Prize, Monday, 10 - 11 AM. IBM executives accept the 1999 INFORMS Prize for excellence in operations research, which they have used to grow the computer giant.
Invisible but Essential
Operations researchers are little known but indispensable experts who use math and science to improve decision-making, management, and operations. They work throughout business, government, and academia. For example, operations research is responsible for the math models used to book the complex web of passenger reservations and discount tickets at busy airlines. Operations research is also used to save lives, for example detecting and assessing the severity of prostate cancer.
The convention will include sessions on topics applied to numerous fields, including commuter transit, e-commerce, health care, information technology, energy, transportation, marketing, telecommunications, and sports. More than 1,600 papers are scheduled to be delivered.
The General Chair of the convention is Professor G. Anandalingam of the University of Pennsylvania. The organizing committees representatives serve with the University of Pennsylvania, including the Wharton School, and Drexel University. Additional information about the conference, with a full list of workshops, is available on the World Wide Web at http://www2.informs.org/Conf/Philadelphia99/ and http://www2.informs.org/Press.
The Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS) is an international scientific society with 12,000 members, including Nobel Prize laureates, dedicated to applying scientific methods to help improve decision-making, management, and operations. Members of INFORMS work primarily in business, government, and academia. They are represented in fields as diverse as airlines, health care, law enforcement, the military, the stock market, and telecommunications.