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Every year, analytics professionals from around the world attend the INFORMS Business Analytics Conference to interact with and learn from leading analytics professionals and industry experts and to gain real-world insights on a successful analytics strategy. From April 15-17, 2018 nearly 1,000 attendees, at all stages of their analytics careers, will travel to Baltimore—the hometown of INFORMS and a vital hub of discovery and growth in Maryland—for the 2018 INFORMS Business Analytics Conference. The conference provides attendees many opportunities to share ideas, to network, and to learn about a range of current topics and trends that can help businesses and organizations improve their analytics prowess by applying science to the art of business.

Three INFORMS members are among those elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 2018: Stephen C Graves of MIT, Ali H Sayed of the University of California, and Jianjun Shi of the Georgia Institute of Technology.

A study published in the INFORMS journal Marketing Science examined the link between Super Bowl viewership across the top advertising markets in the US and corresponding sales in those markets for advertisers brands during the 2006-2011 period. Focusing on the beer and soda categories (top-spending ones as outlined above), the authors estimated in one highlighted finding that “sales of Budweiser can increase as much as 10 six-packs per thousand households for a ten-point increase in ratings during the week leading up to the Super Bowl.” That’s good for Budweiser, which is reportedly now only the 4th-most popular beer in the US.

Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, released in 1937, was the first animated feature-length film. Each frame of Snow White was painted painstakingly by hand to create the fantastical world of the Brother Grimm’s fairy tale. Since 1937, animation technology has advanced beyond recognition, with most animated films using computer-generated images to bring colorful fictional worlds to life. However, according to a study in the INFORMS journal Organization Science, ‘Drawing Snow White and Animating Buzz Lightyear: Technological Toolkits Characteristics and Creativity in Cross-Disciplinary Teams’, a film needs more than dazzling animation technology to impress.