We’re back from the INFORMS 2014 Annual Meeting, and it was a doozy. If you were not able to attend, we’ve taken the sting out of that by giving you the high- and low-lights from the event.
Highlights:
- Our well attended official DPMX software demo, and the on-demand demos requested in the booth. We’re jazzed about DPMX and love talking about it.
- Our awesome swag! You know you’re doing something right when you’re constantly being asked “Can I just take one of these?” or even better, “How much does this cost?”.
- DA’s 50th anniversary talks and gala, featuring Ron Howard and Howard Raiffa in the flesh.
- The abundant traffic at our exhibitor booth, which outpaced previous years despite being in a different hotel than the Decision Analysis tracks.
- Technical talks in the DA tracks from people we hadn’t heard from before.
- Catching up with old friends and meeting some that we’ve traded hundreds of e-mails with over the years in person for the first time.
- All the wonderful food we ate and spirits we drank at Colibri Mexican Bisto, Mikkeller Bar, L’Ottavo Ristorante, Zuni Cafe, just to name a few.
- Close air support from our engineer back at the ranch in Bangor.
- A refreshing run along the Embarcadero for one of us (the others couldn’t be convinced of its heathfulness), the morning after a tamer evening (i.e., one that doesn’t fall under Lowlight #9 below). A good morning’s sleep for the others of us.
- More than 5000 attendees!
Lowlights:
- A hotel with 1,911 rooms and a lobby the size of a boxcar deli whose level of noise is comparable to that of a Mötorhead concert (cf. Highlight #10).
- Everyone else’s swag: C’mon INFORMS exhibitors, austerity sucks, up your swag game!
- Marching left out of the Hilton Union Square ravenous and blindly following my Yelp app to the heart of the Tenderloin. Yikes!
- The ridiculous serpentine Starbuck’s line in above mentioned boxcar lobby of the Hilton.
- The BART Saturday schedule (apparently no attempt at low-carbon transport from the airport goes unpunished).
- The White-horse Inn, San Francisco. It looked like the perfect local dive but we tried thrice over to eat there to no avail! If the cook’s in jail, bail him out!
- The food options at the Detroit airport, with a 3H 40M layover ahead of me, and ending up at the largely unpalatable “Slapshotz Bar and Grill”.
- The INFORMS 2014 Annual Meeting Badge Reader App, more specifically the bugs. The App had the potential to be a highlight, but the obvious bugs sunk it to a mostly lowlight experience.
- How some of us felt certain mornings after consuming rich food at {enter restaurant from Highlight #7} w/a little {enter spirit/wine/beer} mixed in (the dreaded yet inevitable flip-side of Highlight #7 above).
- Saying goodbye to the folks we only see once a year.
See you in Philly next year.