CANA at the 86th MORS Symposium
Professional societies are a way to network, share knowledge and techniques, and move the profession forward. CANA Advisors contributed in a big way to this goal during the 86th MORS Symposium in Monterey, CA at the Naval Postgraduate School.
CANA's Norm Reitter, Lucia Darrow, Carol DeZwarte, and Walt DeGrange
CANA's Carol DeZwarte continued to lead interesting and well attended sessions in Working Group 17: Logistics, Reliability and Maintainability as a co-chair. She will be fleeting up as the chair of the working group next year. This group is considered the home working group for many CANA analysts who have attended and briefed much of their work there over the past years. There were many great briefs covering everything from optimizing inventory to how to develop and deploy complex analytical models.
Two sessions covering how CANA used R to capture inputs and present outputs for a large discrete event simulation attracted huge audiences. CANA's Lucia Darrow did an excellent job discussing the tech behind the implementation and emphasized the importance of deliberate design. She presented "Force Closure Model (FCM): Decision Support Tool Orchestration in R" in Working Group 10: Joint Campaign Analysis and "On-Demand Custom Analytics in R" in Distributed Working Group: Emerging Operations Research.
Lucia Darrow of CANA Advisors presenting at the 86th MORSS
CANA's Walt DeGrange participated as a panel member in a standing room only ethics in analytics discussion. The session discussed the special responsibility that each analyst has to represent their unbiased mathematical model to the best of their ability. There were also several ethical dilemmas that were posed by the audience for the panel to discuss.
CANA's Norm Reitter chaired a meeting of the new MORS Logistics Community of Practice. Close to 30 MORS participants attended to discuss the latest issues and possible solutions within the National Security community.
This symposium also saw the departure of Norm and Walt from the Board of Directors. Norm finished up six years on the board serving as MORS President and finishing up as Past President this year. Walt finished out his four year term on the Board of Directors as the Vice President of Professional Development. Both will remain very active in teaching for the MORS Certificate Program (MCP), and Norm will help future board members in his role as an Advisory Director.
Overall, a great week of networking, learning, and collaborating with the Military Operations Research community.