As many of you may remember, one of the new departments Georgia Perakis established in the journal as EIC has been the Practice Platform. This department is not a traditional department as it has the goal to connect the academic world in operations to practitioners in a multitude of ways.
One of the initiatives this department is working on is the Seminar on Practice Problems. The goal of this initiative is to bring the voice of practitioners closer to the Operations community. The goal of this initiative will be to inspire and facilitate new and exciting operations management research which is relevant and impactful to practice. It will feature invited practitioner presenters who are eager to influence future research in our field by sharing with our community (i) deep contextual knowledge of an industry practice area within the journal's purview; and (ii) some perspective on important and unmet operations related challenges that merit either immediate attention currently lacking, or which will require attention in the near future. The link to the first seminar in this series is here.
We are happy to announce that the second M&SOM Journal Seminar on Practice Problems will take place on Wednesday November 16, 11:00am-noon EDT. Below is more information on this seminar (which is also posted on the webpage here).
Re-thinking AI in a Post Pandemic World: Lessons Learned and New Approaches
Authors: Prakhar Mehrotra (Vice President, Machine Learning, Walmart), Monika Shrivastav (AI Strategy and Operations Lead, Walmart). Detailed biographies are on the webpage.
Abstract: The purpose of this talk is to highlight some of the challenges faced while using AI approaches to tackle problems encountered in the post-pandemic world. Specifically, we want to address the issue of risk vs ambiguity and how we had to change the learning mechanisms of various systems and the objective functions of the optimizers to deal with uncertainty we encountered once the pandemic hit. One of the learnings was that dealing with risks and ambiguity requires different learning paradigms and that there is a need for a more comprehensive unified framework to deal with all types of uncertainty. We offer some examples from our experience at Walmart.
The zoom information is as follows:
Topic: MSOM Practice Platform Seminar - Re-thinking AI in a Post Pandemic World
Time: Nov 16, 2022, 11am AM Eastern Time (US and Canada)
Join Zoom Meeting
https://us06web.zoom.us/j/81237499315?pwd=R1J1TG5FTWFmYUF2ZmJYMXRpN2JTZz09
Meeting ID: 812 3749 9315
Passcode: 227468
Find your local number: https://us06web.zoom.us/u/kcLzbE0Cog
The M&SOM Journal homepage will post the seminar recording through the INFORMS YouTube Channel. M&SOM Journal members will be able to view it later at their convenience if they cannot make it live. Furthermore, the journal will allow for up to a month any comments or questions related to the seminar from the audience (live or not). These will be posted and then monitored by the Practice Platform department editors.
For any questions, please feel free to contact any of us.
Best
The OM Practice Platform Editors:
Pavithra Harsha <pharsha@us.ibm.com>, Jérémie Gallien <jgallien@london.edu>, Ananth Raman <araman@hbs.edu>,
and the M&SOM Journal EIC Georgia Perakis georgiap@mit.edu
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Pavithra Harsha
Principal Research Scientist
IBM Research, Yorktown Heights, NY
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