INFORMS members and other registrants of the INFORMS Practice Meeting in Cambridge are invited to attend the Joint MIT/INFORMS Symposium on Sunday, April 25. As part of the Practice Meeting program, the afternoon symposium will feature another impressive list of speakers led by Tom Magnanti, the dean of MIT's School of Engineering (see story on page 32 for details).

Following are the talks scheduled for April 24:

• John D. C. Little, "The ORC before there was an ORC - through 2054": When did the OR Center REALLY start? What was going on B.C. (Before the Center)? The history of OR and the ORC through 2054.

• Ron Howard, "Early Memories: 1956-1964": Operations research established as a program at MIT. Faculty proselytize OR around the world. OR Group at Arthur D. Little, Inc. pioneers application to business. Gurus Morse and Kimball reign. Probability, Markov processes and dynamic programming burgeon. Newly graduating Ph.D. students feted by the next in line.

• Al Drake, "Recalling the 60's at the ORC": The Beatles, Vietnam, flower children and free love were big things in the 60s. Staying in school to escape the draft was also big. There was an explosive growth in OR theory and applications.

• Ralph Keeney, "24-215, 6.27, and X in the 1960s": The Operations Research Center was a terrific place to be in the late 1960s, mainly due to the wonderful faculty and student colleagues - still good friends today. What students did in and out of school, what was fun, what was worthwhile, and what is still important today.

• Bruce Golden, "Visualization in Operations Research": The impact of visualization on problem solving in OR, focusing on the following applications - vehicle routing, ranking of outstanding sports records, and a visually based decision support system for college selection.

• Margaret Brandeau, "From Venn Diagrams to Bioterrorism: An OR Journey": What do Venn diagrams, subway control systems, ambulance dispatching systems, hospital patient mix, facility location planning, printed circuit board manufacturing, colorectal cancer screening, HIV prevention and bioterrorism all have in common? Operations research.

• Ed Kaplan, "Getting Started": The operations research mindset views the world as an endless sea of decision problems awaiting recognition and formulation: Where do "good" problems come from? How can individual researchers tell if a particular issue is worth pursuing? Revisiting the front end of some personal adventures in policy modeling.

• Jan Hammond, "ORC Values: Learning How to Learn": Our time at the OR Center imbued us all with a set of "values" that underlie the choices we've made and influenced who we are today. During those formative years, we learned how to learn, how to teach, and how to live in a diverse community. How the culture of the OR Center contributed to learning.

• Mitchell H. Burman, "OR: Salvaging Lost Opportunities in Industry (or How to REALLY Sell OR to Industry Management!): "Running a successful OR consulting firm has provided first-hand experience on how valuable operations research can be in industry ‹ along with the stark reality of how OR is greatly misunderstood by the business world. By the very nature of the way we present ourselves and our capabilities, we have become our own worst enemy. Proven methods of getting OR accepted and implemented in mainstream industry.

• Jonathan Caulkins, "OR and the Drug War: Tales from the Trenches": Throughout the late 1980s, Americans listed drugs as the No. 1 problem facing the nation. ORC faculty preached that OR could solve all the important problems in the world. The author believed them and enlisted as chief OR analyst in the drug war. Were they right?



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