In sum, it was a great event with lots of networking. Congrats to the @INFORMS staff for another flawless execution.

Next morning, the conference started with an excellent keynote talk by Jim Diamond (Managing Director, OR and Advanced Analytics at American Airlines, see picture below). This is the ideal opening to the conference for an #avgeek like me.

He discussed the many turbulent times most airlines went through. After these more general overview slides, he went more into detail with regard to challenges in the field of business analytics in the airline industry.

Next, I attended Dr. David Simchi-Levi (see picture below)’s talk titled “The New Frontier in Price Optimization.” He discussed talks multi-armed bandits for optimal pricing decisions and Thompson sampling.

Next, I attended Dr. Dan Putler (see picture below)’s session on “Optimizing Mailing Lists and Content in Direct Marketing

Next, I went to “Practical Approaches using Customer Web Behavior to Maximize Hospitality and Gaming Revenues” talk by Kirby Bosch as part of the Pricing and Revenue Management Track.

During lunch, Dr. Andrew Boyd had the difficult task of entertaining the attendees.

After lunch, I attended Lori Sinn’s talk titled “It Shouldn’t Be This Complicated, But It Is.”

Next, the poster session was held.

The second day of the event, Bill Groves (Chief Data & Analytics Officer at Honeywell International)

After the break, it was time for the 2017 Edelman Winner Reprise Presentation (see picture below).

Then, Jean Utke took the stage for his talk “Data Science At Allstate – What We Learned About Deep Learning.”  He gave a nice testimonial of using Deep Learning using embeddings and CNNs (convolutional neural nets) for processing pictorial data at AllState.

Next, Zachary Anderson (at Electronic Arts) gave his presentation “Estimating Customer Lifetime Value in Free to Play Mobile Games.”

Then, it was time for another poster session during the afternoon break.

Next, Damon Samuel presented his talk “Application of Supervised Machine Learning techniques on Semi-Structured Social Media data for Classification.” He discussed very openly which free open-source software tools to use for analyzing social media data.

The final talk of the conference I attended was by Kyle Hundman titled: “Running the Gamut of IoT: From Spacecraft Telemetry to Facilities Maintenance.”