News Releases

CATONSVILLE, MD, April 1, 2021 – Online marketers have seen the pattern: 95%-98% of online visitors search for something, but the search never converts into a purchase and they leave the site without buying. For marketers, this results in speculation and assumptions that can lead to wasted time and investments in ineffective marketing programs.

CATONSVILLE, MD, March 24, 2021 – COVID-19 has been shown to spread on airplanes by infected passengers, so minimizing the risk of secondary infections aboard aircraft may save lives. New research in the INFORMS journal Service Science uses two models to help solve the airplane seating assignment problem (ASAP). The models can lower the transmission risk of COVID-19 more so than the strategy of blocking the middle seats, given the same number of passengers. 

CATONSVILLE, MD, March 22, 2021 – Authors of a paper examining how information systems can abate racial and other biases in technology, published in the INFORMS journal Management Science, have been chosen as one of five finalists in a prestigious competition for the National Institute for Health Care Management (NIHCM) Award. The winner is recognized with a prize of up to $20,000. 

CATONSVILLE, MD, November 2, 2020 – INFORMS, the largest international association of operations research (O.R.) and analytics professionals and students, announced that retired vice president of Advanced Analytics R&D at SAS Institute Inc., Radhika Kulkarni, has been elected president-elect and will serve as INFORMS president in 2022. 

CATONSVILLE, MD, March 8, 2021 – It’s a common assumption among marketers that if you can customize any form of marketing, particularly mobile advertising, you’ll get better results. With this in mind, mobile marketing relies significantly on user tracking data as a cornerstone advertising strategy.

CATONSVILLE, MD, February 25, 2021 – Short notice versus no advance notice makes a huge difference when it comes to employee scheduling in the restaurant industry. New research in the INFORMS journal Management Science finds checks for parties handled by servers who were asked (with no advance notice) to stay longer than their scheduled shift dropped by 4.4%, on average. 

CATONSVILLE, MD, February 17, 2021 – Policymakers at all levels of government are racing to vaccinate hundreds of millions of people to save lives and blunt the deadly COVID-19 pandemic. New research published in the INFORMS Journal on Applied Analytics provides a simulated model for drive-through clinics that can be used for mass COVID-19 vaccinations based on the successful use of such a clinic to address H1N1. 

CATONSVILLE, MD, February 10, 2021 – Three INFORMS members –Russell Allgor, chief scientist at Amazon, Hani Mahmassani, William A. Patterson Distinguished Chair in Transportation at Northwestern University, and Jong-Shi Pang, Epstein Family Chair of Industrial and Systems Engineering at the University of Southern California – have been elected to the National Academy of Engineering. They join more than 100 new members recently elected. 

CATONSVILLE, MD, February 2, 2021 – According to new research, the presence of an Airbnb property can actually contribute to an increase in housing prices and rental rates in a local neighborhood. But it depends on where the property is located.

CATONSVILLE, MD, January 12, 2021 – Machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) are perfectly suited to help companies and marketers monitor and set prices based on real-time dynamic pricing. But new research has identified some possible unintended consequences of AI in this area.