Media Coverage

Media articles featuring INFORMS members in the news.

Most Recent Media Coverage

Topic

Executive Pay: The final reckoning

October 23, 2014

IN HIS book, “Capital in the Twenty-First Century”, Thomas Piketty argues that it is impossible to find an “objective basis” for the high salaries of senior executives in terms of their individual productivity: they pay themselves such exorbitant sums simply because they can. However, in a forthcoming paper in Management Science, an American journal, two academics claim to have found such an objective measure, and conclude that most bosses are not overpaid.

In their study, Bang Dang Nguyen of the University of Cambridge’s Judge Business School and Kasper Meisner Nielsen of the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology looked at how firms’ shares react when the chief executive or another prominent manager dies suddenly. They identified 149 cases of this happening at American companies between 1991 and 2008.

Marketing Science Study: Skillfully Use Product Placement

October 15, 2014

Consumers have become highly adept at avoiding television advertisements. We switch channels, divert attention to our tablets and phones, and of course fast-forward through ads on our DVRs. Partly in response to this loss of attention, marketers are increasingly focused on product placement as an alternative way of exposing us to their brands. After all, product placement is innately much harder to skip given its integration into the actual program content.

Most academic research on product placement has primarily considered it as a separate persuasive technique independent from the commercial break advertising. That is, mirroring early research on TV advertising, research has focused on how product placement influences viewers’ recall of and attitude toward brands. However, this overlooks the possibility that product placement in a show might influence the likelihood of viewers watching an advertisement for related products at the next commercial break.

In research just published in Marketing Science, my colleagues David Schweidel of Emory University and Natasha Foutz of the University of Virginia and I began to explore whether such synergies exist.

Data Science (and Analytics) Certification

November 12, 2013

Much like the definition of big data, the job description for data scientist is definitely a work in progress. What skills are required? Well, in addition to possessing a strong math and computer science background, including the ability to devise algorithmic solutions to complex problems, data scientists need to be good communicators -- people capable of grasping business issues and explaining data-driven insights to executives and managers.

Fair enough. But how does an organization know that the data scientist it's just hired has all of these skills? The Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS), a 10,000-member international organization of analytics professionals, believes its recently launched Certified Analytics Professional (CAP) program provides the rigorous certification needed in the burgeoning big data field.

"We realized that there were a lot of people putting themselves out there as analytics practitioners, but no real defining body on what that meant," INFORMS president Anne Robinson told InformationWeek in a phone interview.

Tip for Getting Analytics Job: Get Certification

July 3, 2013

[Adam] McElhinney said he thinks Enova's hiring practices and goals are what you'd find at most leading-edge analytics shops. So here are eight things you need to know if you're aiming to pass McElhinney's or his ilk's scrutiny and land a coveted analytics job...

2. Get involved with a professional society. The emphasis here is on involvement. Don't just show up for meetings but become involved in some way -- offer up your web development skills if you have them, or help write a newsletter or volunteer to help plan an event, McElhinney said.

3. Show continued development. McElhinney suggested three ways to make your resume stand out in this respect. One, get an analytics-related certification, be it via an independent organization like INFORMS, platform-specific from a vendor like SAS, or related to a specific domain, like finance, risk, or actuarial science. Two, enter a data analysis competition at Kaggle or the like. You don't have to win, but do be prepared to talk about the experience. Three, participate in open-source software development, maybe creating a package for R, working on a Python data analysis tool, or showcasing projects on GitHub.

Media Contact

Ashley Smith
Public Affairs Coordinator
INFORMS
Catonsville, MD
[email protected]
443-757-3578

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Artificial Intelligence

Why 23andMe’s Genetic Data Could Be a ‘Gold Mine’ for AI Companies

Why 23andMe’s Genetic Data Could Be a ‘Gold Mine’ for AI Companies

TIME, March 26, 2025

The genetic testing company 23andMe, which holds the genetic data of 15 million people, declared bankruptcy on Sunday night after years of financial struggles. This means that all of the extremely personal user data could be up for sale—and that vast trove of genetic data could draw interest from AI companies looking to train their data sets, experts say.

Healthcare

Want to reduce the cost of healthcare? Start with our billing practices.

Want to reduce the cost of healthcare? Start with our billing practices.

The Hill, March 11, 2025

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., as the new secretary of Health and Human Services, is the nation’s de facto healthcare czar. He will have influence over numerous highly visible agencies, including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the National Institutes of Health and the Food and Drug Administration, among others. Given that healthcare is something that touches everyone’s life, his footprint of influence will be expansive. 

We all benefit from and are hurt by health insurance claim denials

We all benefit from and are hurt by health insurance claim denials

Atlanta Journal Constitution, January 23, 2025

Health insurance has become necessary, with large and unpredictable health care costs always looming before each of us. Unfortunately, the majority of people have experienced problems when using their health insurance to pay for their medical care. Health insurance serves as the buffer between patients and the medical care system, using population pooling to mitigate the risk exposure on any one individual.

Supply Chain

Experts warn logistics industry stakeholders to make contingency plans

Experts warn logistics industry stakeholders to make contingency plans

Seafood Source, March 10, 2025

In their March 2025 forecasts, shipping and logistics experts are warning those who rely on the industry to expect continued disruption, and in order to survive a chaotic landscape, they are advising businesses to spend money conservatively, work with trusted partners, and make comprehensive contingency plans.

Climate