Two visionary business leaders will headline the conference program: Patrick T. Harker, dean of The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, and Lawrence D. Burns, vice president of R&D and planning, General Motors. The other 80-plus speakers on the program represent leading companies (Intel, Amazon.com, Federal Reserve Bank, IBM, Forrester Research, StorageTek and others), as well as top business and engineering schools (Stanford, Harvard Business School, Cornell, Penn State and others). MIT ORC faculty and alumni are among the featured speakers.

The program will offer specialized tracks on financial applications, retail operations, supply chain management, new trends and emerging areas for OR. Eleven methodology tutorials will each be presented twice and cover areas such as large-scale neighborhood search, new-category product development, managing uncertainty, agent-based modeling and supply chain risk. In addition, exhibiting companies will provide software tutorials.

For the first time, the conference expanded the reach of speaker invitations through a call for presentations. Two special tracks will feature the 22 presentations chosen through this highly selective submission and review process. These sessions cover the OR landscape, from demand dispatching to information quality, capital allocation in healthcare, real options tools, small OR problems, semiconductor supply chains and much more.

The 2004 Franz Edelman Competition, sponsored by CPMS, The Practice Section of INFORMS, will be fully integrated into the conference so that attendees can select Edelman presentations as part of their track choices. On April 26, seven finalists will showcase high-impact examples of OR in practice, with the winning presentation reprised the next day as a plenary.

The Young Researcher Roundtable, introduced in 2003, will be continued at the Cambridge conference. The program provides young faculty with insights into the critical business problems facing industry, helping them to broaden their research. Participants are nominated by their departments and selected by the conference Advisory Council.

Pre-conference workshops led by exhibiting companies will be offered on April 25, with attendance free to conference registrants. These were a popular new feature at the 2003 meeting, with more than 150 people attending. Another new program is being introduced this year, a continuing education workshop on revenue management for the non-specialist (see box below for details).

The early registration rate of $785-members, $895-nonmembers is available through April 2 (rates increase by $100 after April 2). Companies can also take advantage of a "team discount" rate of $690 (by April 2) when they send three or more attendees to the meeting. All social and meal functions (breakfasts, lunches and two evening receptions) are included in the registration fees.

The conference hotel, the Hyatt Regency Cambridge, is ideally located, adjacent to MIT, close to Harvard Square and just across the river from Boston. The low INFORMS room rate is $159 single/double (call 800-233-1234 or 617-492-1234, or reserve online at the conference Web page).

For continuing updates and to register, go to www.informs.org/Conf/Practice04; 800-343-0062 or 401-722-2595; meetings@informs.org.

Workshop: Revenue Management for the Non-Specialist This new continuing education workshop, set for 9 a.m. to noon on April 25, is designed especially for practitioners who are not revenue management (RM) specialists, but want to explore the possibilities of applying RM ideas and methods in their own settings. Sponsored by the INFORMS Continuing Professional Education Committee, the workshop will be led by Tom Cook, CEO of Caleb Technologies, who is known for his pioneering work in revenue management. Other speakers include Warren Lieberman, president and co-founder, Veritec Solutions Inc., and Garrett van Ryzin, professor of Decision, Risk and Operations, Columbia University Graduate School of Business. Fee: $75

Top Speakers from Business and Academia Representatives from the following companies and universities are scheduled to speak at the INFORMS Conference, April 25-27, in Cambridge, Mass.: AMAZON.COM — Russell Allgor, director of Strategic Planning and Optimization, on real-time order fulfillment FEDERAL RESERVE BANK — Kabir Dutta, economist, on decision analysis approaches for financial risk management HARVARD BUSINESS SCHOOL — Alvin Roth, professor of Economics and Business Administration, on efficient allocation of live donor kidney transplants WHARTON — Karl Ulrich, associate professor of Operations and Information Management, on developing new-category products FORRESTER RESEARCH — Navi Radjou, principal analyst, on optimizing the service supply network BIOGEN-IDEC — Audrey Folan, senior director of Planning & Operations, on OR applications in the biotech industry PENN STATE — Terry Harrison, professor of Supply Chain and Information Systems, with Matt Carlyle, associate professor at Naval Postgraduate School, on designing robust supply chains MIT — Sanjay Sarma, associate professor of Mechanical Engineering, on radio frequency identification and its impact on the supply chain IBBOTTSON ASSOCIATES — Ezra Zask, vice president and manager, on analysis of hedge funds and fund of funds INTEL — Karl Kempf, director of Decision Technologies, on overcoming barriers to applying optimization in business operations MIT — James Orlin, co-director of the MIT Operations Research Center, with Ravindra Ahuja, professor at the University of Florida, on very large-scale neighborhood search STANFORD — Sam Savage, consulting professor of Management Science and Engineering, on managing uncertainty IBM RESEARCH — David Jensen, senior manager of Applied Mathematics, on standards-based grid services for optimization and simulation Plus 70+ speakers offering track sessions, methodology tutorials and software demonstrations.

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