Informs 2001 Annual Meeting

    Informs 2001 Annual Meeting was hold between Nov. 4 and Nov. 7 at Miami Beach, FL. Thanks for the travel support from PFMF, I was able to attend this meeting. In this report, I am going to introduce this institute, INFORMS, and talk about my experience in this meeting. INFORMS is the abbreviation of the Institute for Operations Research (OR) and the Management Sciences (MS). OR/MS are the professional disciplines that deal with the application of information technology for informed decision-making. The goals of OR/MS Professionals are providing rational bases for decision making, predicting system behavior, and improve system performance. The field is closed related to several other fields--applied mathematics, computer science, economics, industrial engineering, and systems engineering. Because of its broad applicability, there are a large number of OR/MS specialists working in non-academic institutes. Those professionals take not only technical positions, also consulting/managerial positions. INFORMS represents professionals in the fields of OR/MS as well as in related fields such as information technology. The mission of INFORMS is to advance the development and dissemination of all aspects of OR/MS. This was my first time of attending a conference after entering the Ph.D program at ASU. It was a great experience, but I was shocked in many aspects.  The weather in Miami Beach: Before I went there, one friend told me that there was a chance of evacuating people who lives close to beach and I might need to stay in her house. My parents even called me from Taiwan to make sure whether I will go or not because they saw the news about the hurricane in Florida. I went anyway. Luckily, the hurricane did not enter Miami Beach, only passed by. The size of the conference: Although many sections were cancelled because of Sep. 11, the meeting was still HUGE. Over 40 sections were hold at the same time for most time during these four days. Those sections were spread out at 3 hotels. One of these hotels was a little far from the other two. It made catching talks between hotels more difficult. The diversity of participants: There were speakers from universities, research institutes, laboratories of industry companies. Furthermore, the background of attendants were even diverse. Their disciplines include mathematics, business, industrial engineering, management, computer science, etc.