INFORMS en ESPAÑOL

By César A. Uribe

What is INFORMS – en ESPAÑOL?

INFORMS en ESPAÑOL is an online lecture series on operations research, analytics, and management sciences in Spanish. INFORMS en ESPAÑOL’s main objective is to promote diversity and inclusion within INFORMS. We seek to break the language barrier and provide a bridge to facilitate communication and experience sharing with the Spanish-speaking community worldwide. The 2020 INFORMS DEI Ambassadors Program supports this effort.

Our objectives: 

Some of the specific objectives of this project are:

  • Provide access to the Spanish-speaking community to state-of-the-art research via ten lectures streamed and recorded online for free.
  • Present INFORMS as a professional organization to the academic community in more than 28 countries where the primary language is Spanish.
  • Inform students and professionals in these countries about the perks of building a relationship with INFORMS and encourage them to make local chapters.
  • Guide undergraduate, graduate, and postdocs about the application process at different schools across the USA tailored explicitly to LGBTQIA+, female, and other under-represented demographic groups.
  • Develop a community of Spanish-speaking members on INFORMS-related research areas around the globe.

We provide free online access to all lectures in the seminar.

The Lectures:

The first block of five online lectures was streamed and recorded during the Fall 2020 term. Our speakers included:

  1. Santiago Segarra, Rice University, Redes y Ciencia de Datos. Segarra discussed recent applications of graph theory and network science to data analysis. He presented case studies on transportation networks, social networks, and new applications to authorship analysis. Moreover, he described the application process to graduate programs at Rice.


  2. Maria De Arteaga, University of Texas – Austin, Riesgos de discriminación en inteligencia artificial. De Arteaga discussed biases in machine learning and artificial intelligence and how to mitigate them. A case study on hiring committees on LinkedIn was presented.


  3. Maria Mayorga, North Carolina State University, Modelos Predictivos de Cuidado de Salud para Medicina Personalizada. Mayorga introduced the concept of predictive models for personalized medicine, emphasizing healthcare. She presented modern approaches based on operations research for patient care.
  4. Marynel Vazquez, Yale, Robótica: Interacción con más de un usuario. Vazquez presented her work on human-robot team interactions. Specifically, she discussed the underlying engineering, psychological and implicit challenges for constructing autonomous systems that interact with their human counterparts.
  5. Jorge I. Poveda, University of Colorado - Boulder , Búsqueda de Equilibrios de Nash en Tiempo Fijo: Convergencia y Estabilidad. Poveda used game and control theory concepts to provide a technically motivated approach for studying intelligent cities. He described how some ideas of user behaviors and optimality can improve the performances of systems and services in modern city planning.

Five additional lectures were streamed and recorded during Spring 2021: 

  1. Jose Fernanando Garcia Tirado, University of Virginia, Páncreas Artificial: Control Automático de Glucosa en Personas con Diabetes Tipo 1. Garcia described his newly developed control-theoretic-based system for automatic glucose regulation for Diabetes type 1 patients. He described the challenges faced in turning an academic engineering work into a product soon available to patients.
  2. Dolores Romero Morales, Copenhagen Business School, Optimización al servicio de una Inteligencia Artificial más Transparente. Romero showcased her recent work on transparent artificial intelligence based on optimization theory tools. Her presentation presented how operations research tools can be used to reduce biases and increasing fairness.
  3. Clara Mosquera López, Oregon Health & Science University, Inteligencia Artificial aplicada a sistemas de apoyo a la toma de decisiones en diabetes tipo 1. Mosquera detailed recent approaches based on machine learning techniques to analyze data from Diabetes Type 1 patients. Her specific focus was on the decision support systems that can be build using modern data science tools.
  4. Claudia Solis-Lemus, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Biologia evolutiva a traves de los ojos de ciencias de datos. Solis-Lemus showed her most recent approaches for the use of data science toward evolutionary biology. Her presentation focused on how data science can help us with phylogenetic three reconstructions among other new application areas in life sciences.
  5. Gabriela Gongora-Svartzman, Carnegie Mellon University, Servicios en Ciudades Inteligentes: Análisis y Visualización de Datos. Gorgonra-Svartzman introduced modern approaches for Smart city analytics, where data science can provide valuable tools for optimizing services. She presented data visualization tools for transportation systems that provide decision-makers with data analytics.

Each of the lectures in the series consisted of four parts. Initially, we presented INFORMS as an organization with the opportunities it enables and the perks of being an active member. Second, the invited speakers presented a research topic of their choice, focusing on their challenges and open problems (related to operations research, analytics, and management sciences). Third, the speaker discussed the application process to their host institution at the undergraduate/graduate/postdoc level and shared the resources available to LGBTQIA+, female, and other under-represented demographic groups. Finally, there was an interactive session held (Q&As).

Some statistics:

  • Ten lectures.
  • Over 5K views of the lectures on Youtube.
  • Over 426 view hours on Youtube.
  • Each video has been seen on average 250 times.
  • Over 800 Registrations for the lectures.
  • Attendees from over 28.
  • Over 119 Followers on Twitter.
lecture attendee stats

map of attendees

Lessons learned: 

  • Asking the speakers to talk about their university, their program, and the application process to their university worked very well. This turned out to be the most interactive part of each session. The attendees' significant confusion or lack of clarity seems to be the application process to U.S.-based PhD programs. A common question was regarding the money needed by a prospective student to pursue a PhD from a U.S. university.
  • Encouraging the creation of INFORMS student chapters was not successful. Even if there are discounts for students, and non-U.S. countries, the fees for creating one are too much for most Latin American countries. We did not identify a sufficient justification for the creation of these local chapters.
  • Registrations for the webinar series were biased towards Colombia, likely because most PI's contacts reside. We are working towards increasing the audience in other countries as well. Personal communications and one- or two-degree separated contacts were the most effective for reaching out when identifying speakers and attendees.  

For the future:

  • We will not run out of speakers, people are reaching out, and we have over 50 professors interested in participating in future lecture series.
  • It seems crucial to secure funding sources to continue the lecture series now that the span of the INFORMS Ambassador Program funding has ended.
  • There is a sizeable audience for lectures in Spanish. We should encourage similar experiences at INFORMS-led events (e.g., annual conferences).
  • This experience can be easily replicated in other languages.

All videos can be freely accessed at

César A. Uribe

Assistant Professor, Louis Owen Jr. Faculty Chair

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

Rice University