INFORMS Open Forum

  • 1.  Generative AI and career paths for students

    Posted 01-16-2025 14:22

    I have a question regarding the impact of the rapid rise of generative AI and deep learning analytics on career paths for students in INFORMS. Specifically, I'm curious about how these advancements might influence future opportunities, skillsets, and areas of focus for students entering the job market. I'm also wondering if INFORMS is monitoring or addressing this through its programs like Mentor Match.



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    Hungpo Chao
    President & CEO
    Energy Trading Analytics, LLC
    Phoenixville PA
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  • 2.  RE: Generative AI and career paths for students

    Posted 01-19-2025 17:13

    Hi, Hungpo! Thank you for bringing this discussion.

    For me, as a Ph.D. candidate, career effects are probably too early to discuss. However, in daily workflow, these are the primary benefits:
    - Programming acceleration with Github Copilot. For the academy (students and lecturers), a professional subscription is free
    - Local AI for privacy-focused priors. Sometimes, having an opinion from the side matters, while a non-submitted paper is an unlikely thing we would like to share. With the Ollama project, there is a natural chance to launch a language model locally and, therefore, proceed without sharing information outside the local system
    - Accelerated paper reading and reference search with popular online generative AI (e.g., ChatPDF, OpenAI ChatGPT, or Microsoft Copilot)
    - Convenient general-purpose search. Googling is fast, but having prior formulated by generative AI is faster

    Best,
    Alexander



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    Aliaksandr Nekrashevich
    Ph.D. Candidate
    Smith School of Business
    Kingston ON
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    Original Message


  • 3.  RE: Generative AI and career paths for students

    Posted 01-20-2025 17:45

    Hi Alexander,

    Thank you for sharing your thoughtful observations and experiences. These examples showcase AI's transformative potential across various aspects of work and research.  Your insights also point to broader implications for attractive INFORMS skillsets and opportunities:

    1. Tools like Copilot may shift the focus from manual programming to higher-level problem formulation, critical evaluation of AI outputs, and strategic integration of AI solutions.
    2. Privacy-conscious tools underscore the growing importance of ethical AI usage-a critical skill as AI adoption accelerates.
    3. These technologies open new avenues for research, including AI-driven optimization methods and enhancing human-AI collaboration in decision-making.
    4. Generative AI is transforming communication and collaboration, enabling greater efficiencies in literature review, proposal development, and stakeholder engagement.

    I'm curious-do you see these tools primarily as augmenting traditional skills or fundamentally reshaping the skillsets required for INFORMS students? Thank you for this intriguing discussion!

    Best regards,

    Hung-po

    __________________________

    Hung-po Chao, Ph.D.

    President & CEO

    Energy Trading Analytics, LLC.;

    Former Consulting Faculty

    Stanford University



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    Hungpo Chao
    President & CEO
    Energy Trading Analytics, LLC
    Phoenixville PA
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    Original Message


  • 4.  RE: Generative AI and career paths for students

    Posted 01-25-2025 12:08

    Hi Hungpo,

    Indeed, I mostly consider Generative AI as an augmentation for traditional skills. Similar to uptraining an artificial neural network from ImageNet to a custom task, more effective optimization when pre-initialized in a point close to optimal,  or faster Googling.

    Whether there are fundamental advantages - probably yes, but unlikely in my case. When visiting the CORS (Canadian Operations Research Society) conference last year, I remember a talk estimating car prices on the secondary market with ChatGPT or similar models. Interestingly, the price indeed decreased with a higher amount of driven miles. Resembles advanced feature engineering with general-purpose language models.

    Yet another helpful scenario - Grammarly or similar software for paraphrasing and advanced grammar corrections. For non-native English, they indeed can help a lot.

    Regards,
    Alexander



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    Aliaksandr Nekrashevich
    Ph.D. Candidate
    Smith School of Business
    Kingston ON
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    Original Message


  • 5.  RE: Generative AI and career paths for students

    Posted 01-21-2025 06:51
    Edited by Jill Capello 01-21-2025 14:39

    Thanks Hungpo for bringing up this important topic and Alexander for the interesting examples for the way you use Generative AI (GenAI). I also personally believe that GenAI could have a significant impact on all aspects or OR/MS and analytics, including practice, research and education.

    INFORMS and its members are also already putting a great deal of thought and effort into both understanding the potential impact of GenAI on the INFORMS community, and on providing resources for educating INFORMS members on GenAI. To name some of the work currently being carried out:

    I'm sure there are also many other works and uses of GenAI by our members. of which I am not aware.

    In general, both due to speed at which GenAI is progressing, and the many ways in which in can impact INFORMS and its members, I believe we'll all be learning together in the next couple of years how this could and should impact our profession. 

    I'd love to hear everyone's thoughts (and also about the ways in which they use GenAI)!



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    Segev Wasserkrug
    Research Staff Member
    IBM Research and Faculty of Data and Decision Science, Technion
    Haifa
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    Original Message


  • 6.  RE: Generative AI and career paths for students

    Posted 01-21-2025 06:52

    Hello,

    Not that I can speak to the society as a whole, but I work with Generative AI in my job, and the first year doing this we were specifically trying to evaluate Gen AI in a range of use cases to understand, 

    I would argue that practitioners within INFORMS have long had to be tool and technique inclusive in the practice of analytics, well beyond the traditional subjects within Operations Research/Management Science.  So the introduction of Generative AI is just like other analytics techniques, we have frameworks to think about how to use it, identifying conditions it is suitable and conditions where it is not. So we need to do that.  And those of us with graduate degrees are supposed to be able to evaluate new things.  

    At the conferences there have been a number of Generative AI focused talks. I was on a panel on applications of Generative AI this past conference in Seattle. So certainly there is history of Generative AI at INFORMS within the community.

    If you or current students are looking for a home within INFORMS, as a practitioner (non-academic) I would look at the Practice Society or the Analytics Society within INFORMS.  That would probably be the place to go to find the people who are working on using Generative AI and implementing it in industrial (non-academic) settings.  



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    Louis Luangkesorn
    Lead Data Scientist
    Highmark Health
    Pittsburgh PA
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    Original Message


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