Informs Today: The Podcast Series

Whether you call it the Affordable Care Act or Obamacare, the law enacted in 2010 has generated strong debate about healthcare in America and the need to balance volume (healthcare providers billing by the number of services provided) with value (a results-based approach tying payment to better health). In this podcast, Atanu Basu, the founder and CEO of analytics software company Ayata, discusses an article on the special role of analytics in healthcare that he co-wrote with Pete Horner in the current, special

A physician may not have more than 15 minutes to discuss your most pressing health issues. So what do you do when you get home and need to make serious choices? Stanford University Professor Stefanos Zenios, the new Editor-in-Chief of the INFORMS journal Operations Research, took a leave of absence to develop a website devoted to patients with kidney disease and other ailments. Listen to him and Dr. Constantia Petrou as they discuss www.konnectology.com, the decision-making website they created for patients with funding from the National Institutes of Health.

What do quantum theory, Schopenhauer, Goethe, and Spinoza have to teach us about the economic disaster of 2007-8? Quite a bit, maintains Emanuel Derman of Columbia University's Industrial Engineering and Operations Research Department. Hear him discuss his new book, Models Behaving Badly: Why Confusing Illusion with Reality Can Lead to Disaster, on Wall Street and in Life.

Foreclosures have devastated neighborhoods, and not just those in inner cities. How can a community development corporation compete with private realtors to acquire a core of foreclosed properties and rehabilitate them in an effort to save a neighborhood? Michael P. Johnson of the University of Massachusetts Boston, author of Community-Based Operations Research and Chair of the INFORMS Section INFORMS Section on Public Programs, Service, and Needs, explains how math modelers help small groups with limited resources do a lot of good.

Professor Laura McLay of Virginia Commonwealth University is a trend setter with her blog Punk Rock Operations Research. Hear her talk about the importance of social media; applying O.R. to healthcare topics like emergency care in extreme weather; why the Chicago Bears are the best football team ever; and her roles as an operations researcher, woman, and mother.

In the post-Osama bin Laden age, the U.S. and nations around the world still face the danger of terrorism in many forms. One threat is terrorists smuggling nuclear material through ports and across borders to assemble a nuclear weapon for a domestic attack. At the 2011 INFORMS annual meeting in Charlotte, North Carolina in November, Prof. Gaukler and colleagues present a paper on O.R. methods used to fight this threat. Prof. Gaukler previews his research in this podcast.

What can discoveries about the human brain teach forecasters, computer scientists, and corporate executives? And why is hockey legend Wayne Gretsky the perfect example of these teachings? Former USA Today reporter Kevin Maney, who wrote a popular article about algorithms in the 1990s, discusses The Two-Second-Advantage: How We Succeed by Anticipating the Future—Just Enough, the new title he wrote with Vivek Ranadivé.

As columnist Vijay Mehrotra explains in the current issue of Analytics Magazine, something has been going right in the city of Raleigh since 2006. Yet if analytics is a household word today, it wasn't five years ago. Michael Rappa, Director of the Institute for Analytics at North Carolina State University, tells how his program began a trend and how it now places 90% of its graduates as the field of analytics flourishes

Picture yourself staring at the screen as your brand X online search for a flight goes on and on. Now look at a travel service like Kayak that explains how the system is checking one airline and one flight after another. Where would you rather search? Would you even be willing to wait slightly longer if you felt you had a window into what was going on as you waited? In the Sepember issue of Management Science, doctoral student Ryan W. Buell and Assoc. Prof. Michael I. Norton of Harvard Business School explore the tradeoffs of the way you wait on the Internet. No reason to wait – hear them explain their research in this week's podcast.

Our emergency rooms have become an alarming example of the physical dangers that can arise from congestion. In an article in the current issue of ORMS Today, Doug Samuelson of InfoLogix, together with emergency care physician Dr. David Eitel of the Wellspan Health System, examines the problems in today's ER's and the creative ways that operations researchers are offering solutions. Hear Doug, who last podcast on the American election system, provide his overview.

Overconfidence can lead CEOs to make bad investment decisions or, worse, choices that leave them squirming in testimony before Parliament. But it can also be their saving grace. The current issue of Management Science includes a revealing study about the positive impact of CEO overconfidence on corporate innovation. Hear the authors, Alberto Galasso of the University of Toronto and Timothy Simcoe Timothy Coe of Boston University, explain their surprising results.

Can the same applications that speed a manufacturer's supply chain also improve disaster relief? Returning guests Pinar Keskinocak and Julie Swann, who co-direct the Center for Health and Humanitarian Logistics at the Georgia Institute of Technology with Ozlem Ergun, provide a sweeping picture of how operations research provides vast humanitarian benefits. The current issue of the INFORMS journal Interfaces, which they edited, includes a refreshing range of humanitarian apps. Hear their discussion of the special issue, including a profile of Prof. Keskinocak's teamwork for CARE International.

The Facebook experience suggests that hundreds of millions of online social media users worldwide have thrown their privacy to the wind. But would consumers, when presented with the choice, opt to pay more to ensure their privacy during online transactions? In their new study in the INFORMS Journal Information Systems Research, Carnegie Mellon's Alessandro Acquisti and colleagues conducted an intriguing experiment that found an unexpected willingness to pay for online privacy. Listen to Prof. Acquisti discuss the results and the unusual experiment that led to these conclusions.

With President Obama declaring a troop drawdown in Afghanistan and counterinsurgency efforts there coming under question, a Defense Department report issued earlier this year sheds welcome light. In April, the Defense Science Board this year issued a peering report into ways that the intelligence community can improve its efforts. The report follows a 2009 report by the board recommending that the Department of Defense make better use of O.R. in intelligence. Hear the co-chairman of the task force that wrote both reports explain their importance.

When you go online to research the doctor who will treat you for cancer or perform your surgery, how sure are you that the ratings you're reading are true? Hear controversial research by the University of Maryland's Ritu Agarwal, Guodong (Gordon) Gao, and Brad N. Greenwood, who, together with Jeffrey McCullough of the University of Minnesota, present their paper at INFORMS Healthcare 2011, which takes place in Montreal this June.

With 80,000 Americans awaiting kidney transplants on any given day, the sad fact is that many people with renal disease will wait years and some will die before a suitable kidney becomes available. A new system for scheduling a fleet of airplanes to fly recipients to cities with available organs may substantially reduce that waiting time. Hear Sridhar Tayur of Carnegie Mellon University and physician Anton Skaro of Northwestern University preview the paper that co-author Baris Ata will present at INFORMS Healthcare 2011, which takes places in Montreal from June 20-22.

In an article in Analytics Magazine, Ryan M. Rodenberg and Anastasios Kaburakis explain how cases involving the NFL, the NCAA, and NASCAR are making legal headlines. In this accompanying podcast, hear them explain how analytics is playing an increasingly important role in sports law. And listen to special advice for operations researchers on becoming expert witnesses.

Carnegie Mellon's Jonathan Caulkins, the leading math modeler specializing in drug trafficking, recounts what he learned about stopping drug use from the coca fields of Columbia, the collapsed drug trade of Australia, and the models of legendary marketing scientist Frank Bass. Hear his observations - and his proposals for reducing drug use - in this interview on a problem that has plagued the Western World for generations.

In the weeks before the INFORMS Analytics conference, ComputerWorld columnist Thornton May podcast some hints on how he would interact with his panelists. Hear him after the fireworks on the surprising insights from FICO's Larry Rosenberg, Gartner VP Bill Hostmann, Sirius XM Radio's Kaiser Fung, and Scott Friesen of Best Buy.

With states cutting budgets and forcing localities to make painful decisions, operations researcher discusses his 2011 INFORMS Analytics Conference presentaition, Analytics to Help Rationalize Police, Fire, and Emergency Medical Services. Hear Prof. Chelst's controversial recommendations about making cuts without sacrificing lives.