A member of the ORMS Group at WBS, Dr Stefano Starita, has been selected to present a poster describing his research on "Joint Capacity Ordering and Trajectory Pricing in European Air Traffic Management" to MPs at the House of Commons as part of the Mathematical Sciences Session of the STEM for Britain 2017 competition for early career researchers. The competition currently attracts around 500 entrants, of whom approximately 35% are selected to present their work in Parliament. The work to be presented is part of a research project funded by the European Union under the Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 699326. The research team at Warwick is being led by Dr Arne Strauss.

Call for papers: Business Analytics: Defining the field and identifying a research agenda

Research into analytics should seek to both incorporate the unique aspects of the OR discipline, as well as the innovations, concerns and characteristics of the analytics movement. Specifically, this special issue aims to invite OR scholars and practitioners to look at:

• Ethics and governance issues in business analytics: How should data be obtained? What are the ethical implications of using applications of business analytics to influence behaviour?
• Big data and business analytics: What are the limitations and applications of optimisation and other OR techniques to large datasets? What are the challenges for applications of OR methods within distributed systems? What is the possibility that OR models could in fact be the producers of big data, e.g. large-scale simulation models? What new methods/models in response to big data e.g. sentiment mining, can be adopted by OR?
• Organizational issues in business analytics adoption: What are the issues facing organizations trying to adopt business analytics? What is the role of real-time applications of OR in organizations?
• Data quality and business analytics: what methods can be used for hypothesis testing and model validation in large datasets? How can unstructured data be used effectively in OR models? What is the role of multi-methodology in business analytics? What opportunities do open data present for the OR discipline?
• Business analytics and decision support: How can data visualisation techniques be used across the breadth of OR? What role do problem structuring and "soft" OR techniques play in analytics and big data projects?

Other topics that have relevance for value creation and organisational implications are also welcome.

We congratulate Temenuzhka Panayotova, MSc Business Analytics 2014-15 at WBS, on winning the Operational Research Society's May Hicks award for the best industry-based student project in Operational Research. The award comes with a £1,000 cheque.

In her dissertation project (supervised by Dr Arne Strauss), Temenuzhka used data mining techniques to help UniCredit Bulbank to identify the next best product to offer clients. Two marketing campaigns were run based on her work that resulted in much higher than usual conversion rates. Her work also received the SAS Dissertation Prize 2015 for the best dissertation in her cohort, and a summary of the dissertation was published in the OR Society's IMPACT Magazine (Spring 2016). Read the full story here.

A number of faculty members of the ORMS Group have been invited to contribute to the scientific programme of the conference. Professor Bo Chen has put together four invited sessions, with two sessions on “Innovating Mathematics for New Industrial Challenges” and the other two on “Theoretical Challenges in OR Research”. There are a total of 15 invited speakers from University of Warwick, Cranfield University, London School of Economics and Political Science, University of Central Lancashire, ETH Zurich, and CWI Amsterdam.

Dr Arne Strauss organises an invited session titled “Last Mile Deliveries” with speakers from RWTH Aachen (Germany), Erasmus University Rotterdam (Netherlands), Bundeswehr University Munich (Germany) and the University of Essex (UK).

Dr Vinh Doan will give an invited talk, “Low-rank Matrix Recovery with Ky Fan 2-k-Norm” in a session titled “Conic Optimization and Applications in OR”. Dr Vladimir Deineko is considering an invitation to give a talk in an invited session.

The JOS editors are delighted to present this call for papers for a special issue on System Dynamics. Guest edited by Martin Kunc, Sally Brailsford and John Morecroft, the journal is interested in submissions that discuss: mode conceptualisation, model development and testing, policy development, and other areas. Please read the full call for details (http://www.springer.com/business+%26+management/journal/41273) . Deadline for submission is March 31st, 2017.