INFORMS Conference on Business Analytics & Operations Research to take place in April

eBay Analytics VP, Google chief economist, world series of analytics/operations research

Analytics, the increasingly important specialty that has been cited by Harvard Business Review, Sloan Management Review, Gartner, and Accenture for aiding better decisions at organizations, will be the focus of a conference hosted by the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS-), the premier organization for advanced analytics professionals.

The INFORMS Conference on Business Analytics & Operations Research takes place at the Hyatt Regency Resort & Spa in Huntington Beach, California from April 15-17.

Speakers from Google, eBay, Target, P&G, LinkedIn, Marriott, Amazon, Cisco, Nestl-, Intel and additional organizations will address the conference.

The meeting will include the organization's 40th anniversary Franz Edelman Award Competition, a world series of analytics with teams from Intel, HP, the CDC, Carlson Hotels, Danaos, and TNT Express competing for the award. More about this year's Edelman competition is at http://www.informs.org/About-INFORMS/News-Room/Press-Releases/Edelman-Finalists-2012.

The conference program includes keynotes by thought leaders at two of the world's largest tech firms.

• eBay: Vice President of Analytics Bob Page. Page leads eBay's data and analytics infrastructure, and is responsible for the strategy and policies that power data-driven decisions.
• Google: Chief Economist Hal Varian. Varian will illustrate how you can use Google Trends data to measure the state of the economy in various sectors, and discuss implications for research and policy.

Details about the keynotes and additional speakers are at http://meetings2.informs.org/Analytics2012/speakers.html.

The conference tracks include The Analytics Process, Decision Analysis, Energy & Environment, Marketing Analytics, Public Sector Analytics, and Supply Chain Management.

Topics include:

• Data Science at LinkedIn
• Driving competitive advantage with operations research and analytics
• Applying Social Media Understanding to a Structured Marketing Data Environment
• High impact analytics teams
• Influencers, Skeptics and Data Geeks: Using Analytics to Drive Organizational Change
• using affinity analysis to uncover the secrets of shopping behavior and responding
• Building an Identity-Based Fraud Detection Filter
• The Numbers Behind Burgers and Fries: A Case Study
• Development and Implementation of a Global Sourcing Optimization Model at Ford Motor Company
• Enabling Intel's Supply Chain through Effective Analytics

The conference will feature an Executive Forum with more than 50 senior executives discussing analytics at their organizations.

Source: Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences