Media Coverage

There is an entire industry built up around deciphering where 16- and 17-year-olds will play college football. Websites boast “crystal ball” predictions of where top high school recruits will suit up. Companies charge for premium subscriptions with claims that they can decode the caprice and whimsy of children. However a new mathematical model can predict with 70 percent accuracy where a high school football player will go to college using nothing but their basic biographical information and Twitter account. The paper on these findings was published this month in the INFORMS journal Decision Analysis.

California’s legal cannabis market, opening for business on Jan. 1, is expected to quickly grow to be the largest in the nation and worth more than $5 billion a year. County voting on Proposition 64 that led the state here — to legalizing sales for recreational use — can offer insight into how medical marijuana dispensaries will now market themselves, according to a new study in the INFORMS journal Organization Science.

An international student in the Master of Engineering Management program at Pennsylvania State University, Samarth Patel, had a unique opportunity to present data on New York City’s bike sharing system, CitiBike, at the INFORMS Annual Meeting in Houston this October.

Waitlists for life-saving kidney transplants are long and every donated kidney is precious. That’s why patients on the waitlist are screened regularly to ensure their suitability for transplant. But is the screening process as effective as it could be? A new study in the INFORMS journal Operations Research, conducted by INFORMS members UBC Sauder professor Steven Shechter, Woonghee Tim Huh of UBC Sauder, and Alireza Sabouri of the University of Calgary, devised a strategy— the first evidence-based tool of its kind— that would reduce the number of risky transplants by 23 per cent and reduce the annual number of screenings by 27 per cent.

According to a new study in the INFORMS journal Management Science, personal unhappiness, particularly that experienced in times of mourning or bereavement, can actually cause a significant decrease in the value of an artist's work.