We are proud that our colleague Irv Lustig received the INFORMS 2017 Volunteer Service Award for Distinguished Service. Irv has recently helped develop and improve programs and outreach to businesses and professional practitioners, a critical initiative for INFORMS. Irv points out how, since he began his career 30 years ago, the landscape for Operations Research has transformed on both the technology side and the human side.
Data availability is obviously much greater than it was before the Internet, but more exciting to Irv is the evolution of the associated tools to explore and understand data, making it easier to then choose the right data for an analytics application. Improvements in the performance of optimization software algorithms and implementations have far exceeded the improvements in hardware performance, making it possible to solve ever larger and more complex problems.