Hello everyone:
The Board of Directors met on July 16th and 17th. Following is a summary of the meeting.
- Health of INFORMS: INFORMS continues to be strong and stable. Our finances are tracking behind last year at this time due to changes in our journal production and lower than anticipated attendance at our international meeting. We still expect to meet budget. Our membership is holding steady overall and early projections for our annual meeting are for a record-setting attendance in Seattle.
- Development: Several funds have been established to receive donations. Please see https://www.informs.org/About-INFORMS/Donate. Four new endowments were established:
- INFORMS Roundtable support for a plenary speaker at the INFORMS Analytics Conference.
- The Sanjay and Panna Mehrotra Research Excellence Award with the Health Applications Society.
- The Harvey J. Greenberg Research Award with the Computing Society, supported by a matching endowment from William and Carol Pierskalla.
- The Donald P. Gaver Early Career Excellence in Operations Research Award.
If you are interested in creating an endowment with INFORMS, please contact Mary Magrogan (mary.magrogan@informs.org).
- Visibility and Advocacy: INFORMS hosted its second Government & Analytics Summit on May 20, 2019. The videos of the day may be viewed at: http://meetings2.informs.org/wordpress/dc-analytics/. The Board discussed metrics for assessing the success of the Advocacy effort, including member engagement as government subject matter experts, in media mentions, and involvement in government briefings, summits, and pop-ups. INFORMS will seek to engage more of its members in our advocacy efforts.
- Database Technology: The Board approved the final phase of funding for INFORMS' new software to support data collection and reporting needs. This will enable easier access by members and new ability for subdivisions to track diversity and other metrics such as membership overlap with other subdivisions, engagement and length of membership. Limited functionality will be available at the Annual Meeting in October, and full functionality will go live in November.
- Journals: The Board approved Gautam Ahuja to be reappointed as Editor-in-Chief for the journal Organization Science. The Board also approved the creation of the new INFORMS Journal on Data Science. The purpose of this new journal is "to promote INFORMS style data science research, particularly the organic integration of operations research and statistics, and to promote operations research concepts and methodologies in data science for creating better data science solutions." The search for an Editor-in-Chief for this new journal will begin in August.
- 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. INFORMS is seeking to build AI collaborations with other professional societies and conferences. The AI Strategy Committee is working on both Internal and External White Papers.
- Strategic Planning: The Board approved funding for conducting Comprehensive Strategic Market Research & Analysis. The last study was conducted in 2010, and the new plan includes updating every two years. The findings will be shared with INFORMS members.
- Summer 2019 Election: Voting will be open online on August 1st and continue through September 30th. The following Board positions are up for election: President-Elect, Secretary, VP-International, VP-Practice, VP-Membership and Professional Recognition, and VP-Marketing, Communications, & Outreach.
- The next Board meeting will be at the Annual meeting in Seattle, October 20-23, 2019.
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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------------------------------