APS Business Meeting Minutes (Summer 2001)
Minutes of the Applied Probability Society's Business Meeting New York City, July 26,
2001 Submitted by: Hayriye Ayhan
1. Les Servi opened the meeting at 6:15pm.
2. Les Servi introduced Mark Dogherty who is the executive manager of INFORMS.
Mark Dogherty gave a brief information about responsibilities of INFORMS staff.
Currently, INFORMS has 35 staff members.
3. Les Servi announced that Karl Sigman will start his presidency of the INFORMS
Applied Probability Society in Fall 2002.
4. The 12th INFORMS Applied Probability meeting will be held in Haifa, Israel from
June 16 to June 18, 2003. The conference chair is Gideon Weiss. Les Servi is looking
for suggestions for the location of the 13th INFORMS Applied Probability meeting.
5. David Yao announced that the nominations for INFORMS John von Neumann
Theory Prize are accepted until September 15, 2001. The nominations should be sent
to the chair of the Prize committee Egon Balas. David Yao is a member of the Prize
committee.
6. Rest of the meeting is devoted to the discussion of the Applied Probability Electronic
Abstracts (APEA). David Stanford proposed some "ground rules" on the
implementation of this electronic abstracting service and solicited the feedback of the
APS members. A) Operation of APEA should be responsibility of two APS
councilors or members (initially David Stanford and Winfried Grassmann.) B)
Initially, no more than one new abstract per lead author will be allowed per month
and at least one of the authors should be a member of APS. C) Abstracts can be a
maximum of two pages. Preferred formats are .pdf or .html files. D) Abstracts will be
submitted using essentially the same submission form as is used by the "Markov
Chain Monte Carlo" site at the Cambridge University
http://www.statslab.cam.ac.uk./~mcmc/. The submitter either provides a link to the
abstract in an acceptable format, or types in the actual abstract in the text box. E)
Initially, visitors to the site would be able to look up abstracts by lead author name
and keywords in the title. Eventually, visitors will be also able to look up abstracts by
subject area keywords. F) David Stanford and Winfried Grassman have been
requested to maintain links to the MCMC site and they also suggest to maintain a link
to the Probability Abstracts web site at the University of Washington, and a link to
INFORMS home page and working paper database. David Stanford and Winfried
Grassmann would like to get suggestions for more links. Suggestions for links should
be emailed to David Stanford stanford@stats.uwo.edu or Winfried Grassmann at
grassman@cs.usask.edu G) For extreme reasons only (i.e. insulting behavior by
submitters), the administrators of the site retain the right of refusal of an abstract. A
guideline on the maximum number of active abstracts will be determined depending
on the demand. H) For the coming year, David Stanford and Winfried Grassman will
operate the service unless it proves hugely time consuming to require extra assistance.
The site will be housed in the department of Statistical and Actuarial Sciences at the
University of Western Ontario. Initially, the abstracts can be emailed to
apea@stats.uwo.ca Les Servi encouraged the attendees of the meeting to email
abstracts and read the abstracts posted at the site.
7. The meeting was adjourned at 6:46pm.