Why join CORS?
If you are a part of the world of operations research, operations management, or analytics, whether as an academic or as a practitioner in industry, involvement in a professional society can take your work to the next level. While there are multiple OR societies outside Canada, CORS offers unique opportunities for its members. As a member of CORS, you will be able to grow your network of Canadian contacts and learn about current ground-breaking advancements developed by Canadian researchers. Members receive discounted registration fees for our annual conference. Members also gain access to the INFOR journal, the ISI-listed journal of CORS, and the CORS Bulletin, a newsletter of the Society and related activities. We additionally have specialized communities of local sections, student chapters, and special interest groups (SIGs), through which you and your research can gain visibility. Our members-only Mailing List provides immediate notification of new job opportunities and other announcements of interest to CORS members.
Obtain a CORS Diploma
Participate in Micro Events
The Teaching and Learning Special Interest Group would like to invite you to our micro-event on Tuesday, March 25th from 4:00 to 5:30PM EST. This virtual seminar will serve as a continuation of our ongoing engagement series where we ask our members to submit reviews of software, tools, and teaching resources that they find made a positive difference in their courses. Our three reviewers from 2024/25 have agreed to showcase their tools in action and answer your questions in this interactive exchange of ideas.
A Zoom link will be sent to registered participants a few days before the event.
Speaker bios and abstracts:
Kyle Maclean, Assistant Professor, Teaching Scholar at Ivey business school at Western University
"I have used Jamovi in an elective course. Jamovi is an open source / free software available either online or pc/mac. It is a no-code software built on top of R, that makes it easy to run multiple regression/scatterplot/ logistic regressions and other predictive modelling analyses. I find it super valuable for doing more "complicated" things than Excel usually allows while still not having to spend time introducing students to R or Python. The students find it easy to pick up and finally find statistics "fun" because they can easily try lots of different models quickly."
https://www.jamovi.org/
Amir Rastpour, Associate Professor of Operations Management at Ontario Tech University, where he teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in Statistics, Operations Management, and Data Analytics. Passionate about enhancing student learning, he develops innovative pedagogical tools, including a game designed to reduce statistics anxiety.
"I teach Statistics to second year business students and have developed a spreadsheet-based game for the first class of an undergraduate Statistics course to motivate students and reduce learning anxiety. Implemented via Google Forms and Sheets, it can be played in both online and in-person classes of any size. The game helps students grasp key statistical concepts and understand the practical value of the tools they will learn. Over six years, pre- and post-game discussions have shown that the game improves students' perceptions of the course and clarifies their understanding of the material.”
The game has recently been published in Journal of Statistics and Data Science Education
(https://doi.org/10.1080/26939169.2024.2319152) and some of our SIG members may find it useful.
Ryan Orchard, Associate Professor in Decision Sciences for the School of Business at MacEwan University in Edmonton, AB, where he has been for 22 years and has received a Distinguished Teaching award. Before joining MacEwan, Ryan worked in industry as a Logistics Engineer for a large logistics/trucking company, and as an Algorithm Developer for a supply chain software company.
"I have been using the Coastal Shipping for Automobile Distribution (Chandra, Vatsa) case from Informs Transactions on Education in my Logistics class (as part of a Supply Chain Major in a Business program) for a number of years. The case has a good logistics problem, in an international setting (India), and is well-written. It also includes data in Excel and requires some modeling, but does not require optimization and thus lends well to undergraduate students and/or less-technical applications (e.g., a more general logistics course rather than an MGTS course). I have developed my own variations of assignments for the students, so that I can do something a little different every term, including a basic total cost analysis as per the case but also some ad hoc tasks like mapping and estimations of lead times under different shipping options. I would be happy to describe these to anyone who is interested."
https://pubsonline.informs.org/doi/10.1287/ited.2021.0253cs
https://pubsonline.informs.org/doi/10.1287/ited.2021.0253ca
The Analytics Special Interest Group would like to invite you to our micro-event on Friday, March 14th from 1:00 to 2:00pm EST. This online seminar will feature Professor Chris Parker from the Darden School of Business at the University of Virginia and will focus on responsible analytics.
A Zoom link will be sent to registered participants a few days before the event.
Seminar Details:
Title: Responsible Analytics Research Seminar: Improving Inventory Support for Mobile Money Businesses
Presented by: Chris Parker from the Darden School of Business at the University of Virginia
Abstract: Base of the pyramid (BOP) customers represent one-third of the world's economy but make five United States dollars or less daily. Providing goods and services to these customers is difficult for traditional firms because most retail activity occurs at small-scale independent outlets. Firms providing products and services to low-income BOP customers are increasingly utilizing independent contractor agents rather than employees in their distribution models. Mobile money is an exemplary platform whereby firms in developing economies provide financial services to customers via cell phones. Mobile money agents service customer withdrawals and deposits as branchless banking outlets. Every day, they decide how much money to stock to service customers' transactions, from which they earn commissions. We investigate the best way to help mobile money agents perform better. I will first discuss a field experiment we conducted in partnership with a Tanzanian mobile money operator to examine how differing types of guidance, and whether in-person training is offered, impact agents' inventory management. We find that those agents given only explicit recommendations (as opposed to summary statistics or both) who were invited to in-person training (as opposed to simply received an automated notification) improve their performance. Agents in other treatments showed no statistically significant change. The effect is concentrated in agents who never replenished their money at a bank and whose money inventory levels were low in the pretreatment period. Second, I will discuss ongoing efforts to model and implement different inventory improvement strategies.
Speaker Bio: Chris Parker is the Richard S. Reynolds associate professor of business administration at the University of Virginia's Darden Graduate School of Business where he teaches core Operations Management courses in Darden's MBA, Executive MBA, and Part-Time MBA programs. His teaching experience also includes courses related to Python programming, business analytics, supply chain analytics, data visualization, statistics, and supply chain design. His research focuses on the impact of information technology on operations. In this work, he examines how information flows affect a firm's decisions and outcomes on a broad set of stakeholders. He then applies OM and analytics principles to find potential improvements. A significant portion of his work has its roots in inclusive prosperity/Socially-Responsible Development with a particular emphasis on emerging markets. While not always distinct from Socially-Responsible Development, he also has research that is more closely categorized as IT-enabled Business Models, Digital Financial Services, and Supply Chain Coordination. His work has appeared in leading operations management and information systems journals including Management Science, Manufacturing & Services Operations Management, Production and Operations Management, and the Journal of Management Information Systems.
We look forward to your participation! Please reach out to stephanie.kelley@smu.ca with any questions about the event.
Friday, February 21st, 2025, 9-11 am (EST)
Enabling cellular network power infrastructure to support the stabilization of power grids
Presented by Brigitte Jaumard, Professor, Concordia University, Montreal
Best-Worst Method: A Behaviorally-Inspired Approach to Decision-Making
Presented by Jafar Rezaei, Delft University of Technology, Netherlands