Media Coverage

Parents, educators, and activists have all raised concerns about the impact of COVID on the educational experience of students. For high school students, these issues are amplified as they consider graduation and what may come after. The impact of COVID on high school grades is a focus of this episode of Stats and Stories with guest Harrison Schramm. Harrison Schramm is a Principal Research Scientist at Group W as well as President-Elect at the Analytics Society of INFORMS. Prior to joining INFORMS he was a Senior Fellow at Center For Strategic And Budgetary Assessments and has been a leader in the Operations Research community for the past decade. Before that, he had a successful career in the US Navy, where he served as a Helicopter Pilot, Military Assistant Professor at the Naval Postgraduate School, and as a lead Operations Research Analyst in the Pentagon. His areas of emphasis were large-scale simulation models, statistics, optimization, and applied probability. His research interests lie at the intersection of data and mathematical models.

The COVID-19 pandemic has been the most significant public health event in the United States since the 1918 H1N1 (Spanish) influenza pandemic.

After a major investment in AI, Amazon says it blocked 10 billion attempted counterfeit listings in 2020. But shoppers should still beware. 

Gaza militants have launched their “Sword of Jerusalem” rocket war with Israel by firing a symbolic salvo at Jerusalem and bigger ones elsewhere. Israel’s “Guardian of the Walls” operation responded with Iron Dome interceptors at home and airstrikes in Gaza.

On 15 August 2020, the Danish Heath Authority (Sundhedsstyrelsen) issued regulations, that among other things, required enforcement of physical distancing, both onboard trains and in public facilities. In many cases, the regulations set a target of 50% capacity. This was enacted on longer distance trains by implementing mandatory seat reservations, which were offered at no charge with a mobile phone app. However, on suburban trains and metros, there are no customer service personnel (conductors) onboard trains, and thus no one available to enforce these reservations. Copenhagen suburban trains have passenger counting technology, and so the national railway company, DSB, implemented a mobile phone app that could display the current occupation percent of individual trains in real time.