• Dr. Pierre Haren, Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer, ILOG-An IBM Company. A leading figure in the European technology community, Pierre Haren is chief executive officer of ILOG. Haren co-founded ILOG in 1987, and after seeing quick growth in Europe, launched fully owned subsidiaries in Singapore, the United States and Japan.
• Thornton May, the IT Leadership Academy. Collecting data from all corners of the technology world, May synthesizes the insights of the top thinkers on the planet seeking to understand where we have been, where are we today and where are we going.

At the conference, operations researchers from major organizations will make presentations about successful O.R. techniques in business and government: the Phoenix-based office of Intel; McDonald's, Merck, ILOG, HP, Southwest Airlines, Procter & Gamble, and FEMA.

Information about the dozens of speakers and topics at the conference is at http://meetings.informs.org/Practice09/program.html.

About INFORMS

The Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS®) is an international scientific society with 10,000 members, including Nobel Prize laureates, dedicated to applying scientific methods to help improve decision-making, management, and operations. Members of INFORMS work in business, government, and academia. They are represented in fields as diverse as airlines, health care, law enforcement, the military, financial engineering, and telecommunications. The INFORMS website is www.informs.org. More information about operations research is at www.scienceofbetter.org.