Fall/Winter 2023
This issue features 8 articles on various hot topics in OR/MS and student-related themes. We celebrate a decade of the magazine with "Blast from the Past: OR/MS Tomorrow Turns 10!" and continue our industry series with "Energy Future Perspectives" on using OR tools for a sustainable environment. We introduce a new STEM outreach series with a recap of the K-12 Education Panel from the 2023 INFORMS Annual Meeting. The "Where are our alumni?" series includes an interview with Nitish Saji, Operations Research Scientist at FedEx. Other articles include a Python tutorial for image recognition, an interview with Dr. Aineth Torres-Ruiz on the intersection of operations research and data science, an analysis of smart ports in "Smart Ports: How Analytics is Reshaping the Global Shipping Industry," and an examination of rising higher education costs in "College Competition and the Connection to Rising Student Costs."
Spring/Summer 2023
Our articles cover diverse topics, continuing our mental health series with a review of "Managing your Mental Health during your PhD" by Zoe J. Ayres and tips on handling procrastination in your final semester. The industry series explores OR/MS applications in finance, predictive analytics in healthcare, and data analytics for demand and supply management. We also discuss the parent-child matching problem in the U.S. foster care system, ChatGPT's role in research and teaching with insights from professors Tinglong Dai and Matthieu Gruson, spotlight the award-winning INFORMS Student Chapter at the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile, and debut our "Where are our alumni?" series featuring Dr. Yue Wang, incoming assistant professor at the University of Arizona.
Fall/Winter 2022
We start with the more traditional areas. First, we discuss how firms are being strategic (or not) about becoming cybersecurity resilient. We continue with a review of a last-mile delivery trend: crowd-shipping. Then, we switch gears toward non-traditional OR/MS applications. First, we examine how OR/MS ideas have indirectly influenced nature reserve design. Second, we discuss the resource allocation problem in the U.S. foster care system. Here, we move to a group of articles spotlighting students: a discussion about mental health in graduate school, a guide on INFORMS student chapters, and an interview with the INFORMS student chapter at the University of Massachusetts - Amherst. We conclude this issue by featuring our mini poster competition’s results and winning entries in our last article.
Spring/Summer 2022
In this issue, we discuss a myriad of topics in different areas, including the role of operations research in non-traditional OR/MS topics of ecological studies and modern art. From there, the issue jumps into data analysis, with an article presenting a scaffolded project implementation to teach data analytics to undergraduate students, and an article discussing how to visualize multidimensional data and use tours to help analysts to glean information from data. Lastly, the issue moves toward transportation matters with an interview with Dr. Ismael, who discusses urban freight and parkingissues.
Fall/Winter 2021
This issue is dedicated to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives in the ORMS community. We have covered a myriad of topics including trustworthy artificial intelligence, equity in vaccine distribution, and the gender gap in engineering and science. Special thanks to Prof. Soroush Saghafian for sharing his view on the role of ORMS in healthcare analytics and a huge thank you to Prof. Michael Johnson for sharing with us how the ORMS community can contribute to research on racism and discrimination.
Spring/Summer 2021
In this issue, we discuss a myriad of topics in different areas, including analytics to address homelessness, operations management within the sharing economy, algorithmic perspective of metaheuristics in optimization and transportation, air quality and health impacts during COVID-19. We also reached out to the 2020 Judith Liebman Award Winners Sebastián Barriga, Wesley Marrero, and Hyame Alameddine to share with us their experience as inspiring student volunteers in their universities, their student chapters, and INFORMS. Many thanks to Associate Professor Minh-Ngoc Tran and Tiffany Li for sharing their work on cognitive modelling of consumer preferences. We would also like to thank Associate Professor Evrim Dalkiran for sharing a large variety of modern tools for operations research and Dr. Subhabrata for sharing with us about the COVID-19 vaccine supply chain strategies. Thank you to Dr. Robert James for sharing on the topic of Dynamic Time Warping.
Fall/Winter 2020
Congratulations to the winners of our first ever mini-poster competition! In this issue, we discuss a myriad of topics in different areas, including a system dynamic analysis on declining college enrollments, simulation-based optimization, a brief survey on well-known algorithms that changed the world, wind farm layout optimization and the urban planning concept of a 20-minutes neighborhood. Special thanks to Prof. Michael Bell for sharing his view on green urban logistics. We would also like to thank Mr. Mayank Batra for his time to discuss with us the supply chain strategies of Mint pharmaceutical during COVID-19. We also spotlight the INFORMS student chapter at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Last but not least, don’t miss out on the information about competitions held by the Consortium for Mathematics and Its Applications (COMAP)!
Spring/Summer 2020
Some of the articles in this issue are about facing and conquering COVID-19 related challenges ranging from hospital resource management, supply chain resilience, to navigating the job market (Academia and Industry). Being the voice of OR/MS students, we saw the anxiety that COVID-19 has caused to our colleagues in the job market. We hope that this issue will provide some helpful tips during your job search journey. Many Thanks to Dean Cole Smith, Prof. Dmytro Matsypura, Prof. Jennifer Bechkoff, and Karen Cowan, for their valuable insights on this topic.
Fall 2019
We are excited to announce the results from our first-ever student writing competition conducted earlier this year. The three winning articles, spanning topics from AI in healthcare to OR in gerrymandering, are published in this issue. The judging committee, consisting of our writing staff and editorial board members, evaluated the submissions based on criteria such as argument, topic, and form.
Fall/Winter 2018
This thematic issue focuses on operations research and game theory. The analysis of games has been recorded as early as President James Madison’s analysis on the behavior of US states under different taxation systems. Modern game theory has evolved quite a bit, with extensive developments since the 1950s. The articles in this issue serve as an introductory peak into the rich area of game theory, and its interplay with traditional operations research concepts. In addition to delving into the applications of game theory in health-care supply chains and cake cutting protocols, this issue also showcases methodological topics such as bi-level programming and machine learning.
Spring/Summer 2018
This issue focuses on machine learning (ML) and operations research (OR). The past few years has seen a proliferation of work in the exciting intersection of machine learning and operations research, both in terms of methodological research and practical applications. This dedicated issue highlights the use of machine learning in specific domains such as in the energy sector, material science, ethnography, etc., and discusses recent work in integer programming and ML, in addition to the perception of ML from the OR side.
Fall 2017
Our theme for this issue focusses on Hurricanes and the role ORMS plays in helping humanity deal with these natural disasters. This past year has seen a record number of Hurricanes landing in the United States and all of us, as Operations Research practitioners, have a duty in helping our planet tackle them. In this issue, we provide you with articles about forecasting techniques, the history of disaster management, the use of simulation to predict and assess hurricanes, and highlight student chapters that play important roles in this arena.
Spring/Summer 2016
In the fourth thematic OR/MS Tomorrow issue on Retail Analytics, we provide a better glimpse into the field through from expert commentary from Dr. Mokhtar Bazaraa and applied research being performed at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center. Moreover, we highlight what could entail the Future of Retail Analytics. We round out this issue by highlighting our community in the student chapter spotlight, society spotlight, and undergraduate student research spotlight. We also highlight some future conferences that you might want to attend that are related to our theme.
Fall/Winter 2014
This is our second thematic issue OR/MS Tomorrow, which focuses on OR in Big Data and Analytics. We begin this article with a feature interview with Professor Michael J. Franklin from the EECS Department at the University of California Berkeley. In OR Across the Globe, this edition continues the focus in Africa, but now focuses on big data analytics. Next, we continue our spotlights on a student chapter and journal. This issue's Student Chapter Spotlight is the University of Toronto Operations Research Group while the Journal/Society Spotlight is the Big Data & Society (BD&S). We end the issue with information for you to learn more about Big Data and Analytics.
Fall/Winter 2013
In the first thematic issue of OR/MS Tomorrow, we featured an interview about the role of OR in healthcare with Professor Dimitris Bertsimas, the Boeing Professor of Operations Research and the co-director of the Operations Research Center at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In our second feature, Margaret L. Brandeau from the Department of Management Science and Engineering at Stanford University described a five-step path to a successful application of OR in healthcare. We presented an article about several OR activities in South Africa by presenting the conferences and societies organized in this area. We spotlighted INFORMS@USF, the INFORMS student chapter at the University of South Florida and announced the winner of the2013 INFORMS/Organization Science Dissertation Proposal Competition.
Spring/Summer 2013
In this issue, we feature the “Stochastic Challenge” website and two reprints of articles recently published in INFORMS journals. We spotlight a the University of Massachusetts Amherst INFORMS student chapter, including their “Inaugural Dow Big Data Challenge." We also spotlight the INFORMS Behavioral Operations Section. Last but not least, we include important upcoming conferences and journals with special issues.