Informs Today: The Podcast Series

Thornton May has made his reputation in the IT world – he is a ComputerWorld columnist and serves as Executive Director of the IT Leadership Academy – but he's a man who knows value when he sees it. The author of "The New Know: Analytics, Innovation, and Transformation" will do a guest tour of a high level panel on analytics at the INFORMS Conference on Business Analytics and Operations Research in Chicago.

In the U.S. every spring, sports fans are possessed with a condition called March Madness as the top basketball teams in the country compete in a tournament to determine the champion team of the year. Throughout American workplaces, employees have their own competition in the form of office pools. Hear two experts in the math of sports provide their special forecasts. Georgia Tech's Professor Joel Sokol Joel Sokol has his March Madness website here. University of Illinois Professor Sheldon Jacobson Sheldon Jacobson's March Madness website is here .

In troubled economic times, business leaders can take two approaches to their assets: they can take out the budget knife, resulting in temporary savings and long-term damage to their companies; or they can ask themselves how they can optimize, making what’s good about their organizations even better. Princeton Consultants' Steve Sashihara, author of the new title The Optimization Edge, provides management and C-level executives with strong advice on how to succeed at optimization projects in this revealing interview.

IBM's Deep Blue proved its mettle playing chess against human grandmasters. But could the numbers crunchers at the IBM Watson Center create a program that would allow a computer to play in a free format question-and-answer game show? Stephen Baker, the former BusinessWeek reporter and author of the 2009 book The Numerati explains the story behind the February, 2011 contest on the popular television series Jeopardy. Hear the author of the new Final Jeopardy: Man vs. Machine and the Quest to Know Everything.

J. Eric Bickel of the University of Texas collaborated with the controversial filmmaker Bjorn Lomborg on his documentary, Cool It, which has generated debate among students of global warming. In a chapter in Lomborg's new volume, Smart Solutions to Climate Change, Bickel examines the most promising technologies for slowing climate change.

What does the downturn in the global economy mean for companies that must plan complex operations and supply chain management in the face of volatile oil prices, diminished consumer demand, and pressures on businesses to go green? MIT's David Simchi-Levi, Editor-in-Chief of the INFORMS journal Operations Research, provides rules that are as tightly constructed as the laws of physics in his new book, Operations Rules. Listen to his essential advice for business executives.

Can analytics help an HR department hire and retain top staff? You bet, says Jeanne G. Harris of Accenture. Hear the co-author of Competing on Analytics and the new Analytics at Work explain how to put the right metrics in place and improve your workforce.

Demand on America's electric power grid will be affected by everything from a projected increase in electric cars to new policies reducing the carbon footprint. Two things are for certain: One, that providing energy will be very different in just a few short years. And two, that quantitative experts are needed to plan for change. Hear Joan Woodard, Executive Vice President Emeritus at Sandia National Labs, elaborate on her INFORMS Annual Meeting Plenary in this look at energy's future.

Business Intelligence (BI) is becoming an increasingly important method of capitalizing on the data that most businesses and organizations now store. Bill Hostmann, a Vice President and Distinguished Analyst at Gartner, provides a sophisticated approach to making BI a core competency.

What will the 2010 midterm elections mean for Congressional Democrats? And why won't their loss of seats sink the hopes of President Obama for a second term? History Professor Allan Lichtman of American University explains what his model, The Keys to the White House, forecasts for 2012 and why the surprisingly uphill battle will be for Republican presidential hopefuls.

How can online merchants learn more about their potential customers by mining the data surrounding social media – without violating strict privacy rules? Claudia Perlich of Media6Degrees explains how she and her colleagues zero in on individual customers in projects that have benefited Netflix, IBM, and healthcare providers.

Shouldn't major business decisions about acquiring a company be made strictly on the merits? Hear surprising discoveries about the way that male CEOs testosterone levels affects their business judgment, and discoveries about how having women on a company's board can improve the way a company conducts mergers and acquisitions in this unusual exploration into physiology's impact on the business world.

Turbulence on Wall Street Financial engineering came under a microscope in August 2007, when so-called "quant funds" suffered hundreds of millions of dollars of losses. A year later, when economic turmoil broadly hit finance and banking, mathematical modeling came again under scrutiny. Former Wall Street Journal reporter Scott Patterson examines the wins and losses in his new book "The Quants."

Admiral Mike Mullen, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has a unique qualification: He holds a master's degree in operations research, making him one of the highest placed executives - and military men – in the world with a quantitative degree. In an exclusive interview, Admiral Mullen tells how his expertise in the decision sciences helps him make difficult choices for the armed services of the United States. Hear the admiral share his special views on how analytics in the military and business sector intersect.

In today's world of spy vs. spy, you need to do more than outfight your opponent; you need to out-think him, as well. Edward H. Kaplan of Yale University, the 2010- 2011 INFORMS Morse Lecturer has been using analytics to model potential terror and bioterror attacks since 9-11 and the anthrax mailings that followed weeks later. In a study, Terror Queues, appearing in the upcoming July/August issue of Operations Research, he explains how techniques now being used to study grocery store queues can also be used to assess the strength of terror plotters. This analysis, in turn, strengthens the ability of governments to thwart planned attacks on civilians. You’ll be amazed at the novel thinking in these new techniques.

If you want to improve your bottom line, you'll find that determining a better price for your product is far less painful than trying to drive costs down. As some business people grow more sophisticated in their pricing and do more than just set prices by conjecture, one expert wonders why most businesses don't set prices scientifically. Dr. E. Andrew Boyd, who appears regularly on KUHF-FM's Engines of our Ingenuity and in the pages of Analytics, has worked with major airlines setting prices. Hear him explain the history of pricing and reservations in the airlines - including the unexpected roll of gumballs. What you'll learn will surprise you.

When digital cameras were developing, analysts watching the stocks of companies like Kodak and Polaroid said, 'stay with film'. And when VoIP Internet phones began, stock analysts cautioned telecommunications companies about entering the new market. Why? Hear Wharton's Mary J. Benner, author of the study Securities Analysts and Incumbent Response to Radical Technological Change, published by Organization Science, explain her surprising findings.

In an age when advances in technology are threatened by attackers who would hack and disable that technology, the United States and other governments are focusing more and more resources on protecting their infrastructure. Professors at the Naval Postgraduate School are conducting extensive research into protecting the U.S. transportation, communications, and energy systems. Hear David Alderson explain what his colleagues are pioneering - and why the controversy about the best way to protect the infrastructure is more contentious than ever.

When physicians choose radiation to battle cancer and cancerous tumors, they are fighting not just in three dimensions but four – they must take into account not only the shape and size of the cancer but also the fourth dimension of time in modeling treatment. Learn how O.R. innovations have helped create treatment plans that do a better job healing patients, avoiding radiation damage to healthy tissue, and saving a half billion dollars.

Predicting the purchasing patterns of consumers has been an inexact science for math modelers, but two researchers believe the answer is not in modeling the way that consumers behave but mapping their many disparate thoughts and actions on the way to their purchase decision. Hear Warren Lieberman and Michael Raskin of Veritec Solutions on new insights into a perennial challenge for marketers.