The Board of Directors met on October 19th and 20th. The following is a Summary of the Fall Board Meeting.
- Health of INFORMS: INFORMS is very healthy and continues to grow – We are breaking records in meetings, publications, and membership (read below for more details). Additionally, outreach and advocacy programs are increasing visibility, professional development and certification programs are growing, and international, education and industry programs have expanded. Our finances continue to provide us the reserves necessary to achieve our goals, increase member benefits and value, provide stronger links between academics and industry, and insure the long-term strength and health of INFORMS.
- Visibility and Membership: The wining video from the Student Video Competition, produced by the Virginia Tech Student Chapter, has inspired the creation of a new INFORMS video intended for an undergraduate audience: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9-MITCoka-Q.
- The Board held a brainstorming session on achieving better communication with INFORMS members. Suggestions on improving member communications may be sent to Ashley Kilgore, akilgore@informs.org.
- Meetings: Attendance at the Annual Meeting in Seattle reached over 7300, setting a new record (up 18% from last year). The Board approved the location of the 2021 International Conference in Medellin, Columbia.
- Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI): The Board approved an initiative to support DEI Ambassadors. The DEI Ambassadors initiative was supported by over 125 INFORMS members, including Fellows, former Presidents, and leadership across INFORMS subdivisions. As part of the initiative, INFORMS members still need to ensure their membership information is complete. Click here to login and update your information.
- Practice Strategy: Three committees have been formed to build stronger connections with industry members. The Industry Outreach and Engagement Committee was established to advocate to industry the importance of OR/analytics, the awareness of INFORMS, and the availability of resources to assist them. The Committee on Industry-Academia Collaborations was established as an open committee to encourage and enable anyone interested in assisting with these efforts to join the committee. The Committee's purpose is to facilitate partnerships among practice organizations and academic institutions while supporting the development of the next generation of OR/analytics professionals. Finally, the Analytics Career Pathway Task Force was launched to respond to the need for defined career pathways for analytics professionals.
- Journals: The Board approved Michael Gorman's reappointment as Editor-in-Chief for the journal INFORMS Journal on Advanced Analytics and Alok Gupta's reappointment as Editor-in-Chief for the journal Information Systems Research. Nominations for Editor-in-Chief for the new INFORMS Journal on Data Science are currently being solicited. Deadline is November 30, 2019. Further information may be found at: https://pubsonline.informs.org/do/10.1287/orms.2019.05.23n/full/. Full-text downloads of full articles are expected to exceed 2.6 million this year, up from our 2 million record last year (YTD growth is already 22.2% higher than last year). Submissions continue to climb and are up 9.2% over last year.
- Artificial Intelligence (AI) Strategy: The Board continued discussions with a vision to better position INFORMS and the profession to contribute to and benefit from AI. The Board approved an AI Strategy Internal White Paper for distribution to INFORMS members.
- Membership: We have our highest number of regular and student new members YTD and both regular and student member retention is up.
- The next Board meeting will be January 31, 2020.
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Victoria (Tory) C. P. Chen, Ph.D.
Secretary of INFORMS
secretary@mail.informs.orgProfessor
Department of Industrial, Manufacturing, & Systems Engineering,
Center on Stochastic Modeling, Optimization, & Statistics (COSMOS),
The University of Texas at Arlington,
Campus Box 19017,
Arlington, TX 76019
Email:
vchen@uta.edu------------------------------