May1999

MINUTES of Spring 1999 BUSINESS MEETING

Minutes of the Optimization Section (OS) business meeting during the INFORMS conference in Cincinnati, OH, May 4, 1999: 
 
1. The meeting was called to order by Chanaka Edirisinghe, OS vice chair for stochastic programming, at 6:15 pm. Present were: 
 
Chanaka Edirisinghe, Nick Sahinidis, Sanjay Saigal, Dave Morton, Ladislav Lettovsky, Alper Atamturk, Matthew Saltzman, Kevin Wood, Elkafi Hassini, Robin Lougee-Heimer, Warren Adams, Mahyar Amouzegar, Carlton Scott, Julie Higle, Pitu Mirchandani, Janny Leung, Suvrajeet Sen, Irv Lustig, Kathryn Stecke. 
 
2. Julie Higle suggested that it would be a good idea to circulate the schedule of all OS sponsored sessions between all vice chairs so as to avoid parallel schedule of sessions on similar topics as happened in this meeting. As OS is growing its activities are likely to require more careful planning. 
 
3. Matt Saltzman reported that membership of the INFORMS Computing Society (ICS) has dropped lately while OS membership has increased. (Comment added after the meeting: OS was formed in 1995. The OS membership grew to 357 in 1996, 513 in 1997, 700 in 1998, and is now 737.) Saltzman encouraged members of OS to also become members of ICS as many of the ICS activities are optimization-related. Sanjay Saigal added that soda was not missing from the business meeting of ICS but it was not available during OS business meeting. 
 
4. Secretary/tresurer's report (Nick Sahinidis for Sharon Filipowski): There is a positive balance in our bank account of over $5000. The ad for the OS prize for young researchers has appeared in societal publications and will appear in several additional ones soon. Nominations should be sent to Gerard Cornuejols. 
 
5. Julie Higle noted that all the tutorials this year were scheduled at the same time. Carlton Scott suggested that this is a very bad practice; there are many members that come to attend mostly tutorials. It would be better to randomly scatter tutorials throughout the conference. Suggestions along these lines should be sent to meetings@informs.org.
6. Nick Sahinidis pointed out that the "master schedule" of this year's conference appeared on the inside of the back cover of the bulletin instead of the outside of the cover where it historically appeared. It would be much more convenient to put the master schedule on the outside. Chanaka Edirisinghe added that it would also be a good idea to insert some blank pages in the bulletin for taking "notes". Pitu Mirchandani expressed the desire to get the program in the mail about a week before the conference. Related suggestions should be sent to meetings@informs.org.
7. George Polak stopped by to thank the optimization section on behalf of the organizing committee of the Cincinnati meeting for organizing the optimization sessions.
8. Suvrajeet Sen anounced that the suggested name for an upcoming INFORMS publication is "Management Science Education". He proposed that the name of the publication should reflect "operations research" as well, a term most commonly used in Engineering departments. A petition was signed and will be sent to Erhan Erkut, John Birge and Ananta Balakrishnan with the suggestion to use the name "INFORMS Transactions on Education" for this publication. 
 
9. The meeting was adjourned at 6:55 pm. 
 
Respectfully submitted by Nick Sahinidis.