As a proud MORS Partner, Team CANA was represented in force at the 2019 MORS Emerging Techniques Forum (ETF). Norm Reitter, Walt DeGrange, and Renee Carlucci helped with organizing key aspects of the event. Rocky Graciani and Jason Fincher took the opportunity to enjoy some professional development, networking, and the Hilton’s excellent catering.
This event ran from 4 to 5 December, in Alexandria, Virginia, and included nearly 30 presentations on topics ranging from new takes on calculating readiness to methods for capturing and capitalizing on video and speech data. Presenters provided new and emerging methods in machine learning, robust optimization, data post processing and synthesis, and a variety of operations research based modeling.
Keynote speakers included Mr. Marck Vaisman, a Senior Cloud Solutions Architect and Data Scientist at Microsoft, and the Honorable Mr. Alan R. Shaffer, Deputy Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition and Sustainment.
This event also provided a venue to showcase the work of MORS Junior Analysts. Six candidates presented and were evaluated by a panel of MORs judges (including Norm and Renee). The top presentation, “Predicting Crisis Behavior with Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning” presented by Dr. David Masad of Booz Allen Hamilton, received the inaugural Eugene P. Visco Prize for International Collaboration in Operations Research. The award provides the opportunity for the winner to present in July 2020 at the ISMOR conference in London, England.
In addition, CANA’s Walt DeGrange led an industry panel on the state of using artificial intelligence (AI) to tackle challenging National Security problems.
This event epitomized how a community of interest can share ideas and elevate the thinking and skills of the whole field. Team CANA remains committed to support and contribute to this important effort.
CANA continues to provide leadership within the MORS community - representative of CANA’s strong commitment to professional collaboration, information sharing, networking, and development across multiple professional societies.
As part of this commitment, CANA leads the MORS Logistics Community of Practice, meeting the third Tuesday of every month at noon Eastern Time. Please reach out to present or otherwise participate in this specialized forum that focuses on applying operations research and other analytics methods to tackle tough logistics problems within the National Security Community.
If you'd like to learn more about CANA's ongoing participation in MORS and other professional societies focused on analytics and operations research, please contact Mr. Walt DeGrange, CANA's Director of Analytics Capabilities.
Mr. Walt DeGrange
Director of Analytics Capabilities