Fall/Winter 2024 Issue:
The online student membership magazine for INFORMS. The bi-annual publication provides a look at operations research and management science from the perspective of young people in those fields. Edited by a team of students and junior faculty, the magazine is written for students and aims to introduce topics relevant to them, highlight their accomplishments, and promote awareness of current events and issues in OR and MS.
Articles & Interviews
OR/MS Tomorrow Spotlights
The INFORMS diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) committee started in 2020 and has since been an advocate for advancing DEI-related initiatives within the Institute. This article discusses what the DEI committee is, student-relevant initiatives, and a 2024 DEI ambassador project on TechFest Dayton.
Being an active INFORMS student chapter officer is an amazing but very challenging endeavor. As an officer of an INFORMS student chapter, we have the opportunity and responsibility of helping to shape the ORMS/analytics community in our department, university and beyond. The challenges are considerable: we must commit to a lot of volunteer work on top of our already very demanding program; we might not have a clue how to engage students with our chapter; we might not know which activities and special events to promote; our chapter might not have a solid onboarding program for new officers and the new leadership board might have to start their planning from scratch; we might not know what to expect from our department and/or faculty advisor; and we might not know what other members expect from their chapter. The key to solving most of these challenges might be cooperation among student chapters. In this article, we report on the the realization of the first Southeast INFORMS Student Chapter Retreat, and how this kind of initiative can be a strong driver of success for student chapters.
There’s plenty of room at the bottom was the title of the lecture that Richard Feynman delivered in 1959. His talk at Caltech had more to do with what the future of information storage looked like, and that there was plenty of room available at the atomic level for the same. In the interest of this article however, we take a generalist view on the title of his talk and interpret it as “. . . plenty of room [for exploration] . . . ”. While Feynman was correct and we’ve indeed witnessed the meteoric rise in storage capabilities, the room for exploration has definitely squeezed a bit lately, with the debut of Quantum Computers. This article nevertheless is an attempt to give the reader i) a glimpse of status quo of computing at a quantum mechanical level, and ii) a peek into how algorithms differ in this bizarre way of computing. We believe that this write-up will invariably educate or inspire the next/current generation of OR/MS students who are interested in the subject and are adventurous enough to test out a new potential career path.