Wednesday, January 14, 2015

The INFORMS Computing Society Conference Was Terrific!

I hope that all that attended the INFORMS Computing Society Conference, which ended yesterday, made it home back safely!


I'd like to thank the organizing committee for such a great conference. The venue at the Omni hotel in Richmond, Virgina made for a convenient location, great socializing, and fabulous plenary talks and tutorials plus sessions.
 
 
I was pleased that three of our doctoral students at the Isenberg School of Management, Tulay Flammand, Heng Chen, and my student, Sara Saberi, got a chance to present their work there and to do some serious networking.
It was great to reconnect with many wonderful colleagues - I capture only some of them in the photos here. It was fun to also meet new people, including one of the plenary speakers,  Richard Stallman of the Free Software Foundation, with whom I shared a taxi to the Richmond airport after the conference. (On the way to the conference I shared a cab from the airport with Sheldon Jacobson.)  The full conference program and the conference Proceedings can be downloaded here.
 The hotel was close to the State House with a minipark and only 2 blocks from the river walk.
 
And I will make good use of my conference souvenir umbrella, which was a challenge carrying on the two-legged flights but everyone got to hear how it was a souvenir from the INFORMS Computing Society conference.

Thanks, again, to the organizers and to the speakers for the great intellectual stimulation and fun!