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Peter-André Alt, President of Freie Universität Berlin

Peter-André Alt, President of Freie Universität Berlin

Peter-André Alt, President of Freie Universität Berlin
Image Credit: © Bernd Wannenmacher

Dear participants of OR 2017,

On behalf of Freie Universität Berlin I would like to welcome you to the International Conference on Operations Research 2017!

I am delighted to say that this is our second time of hosting this distinguished conference at Freie Universität Berlin. The first conference, the 8th DGOR organized by Peter Stahlknecht, was held in 1978 with 400 participants, featuring 125 talks which – a novelty at the time – were organized into parallel streams in order to provide more time for presentation and discussion.

Certainly, many things have changed within the last 40 years. In 1978, to "utilize data availability" was the second case Eberhard Elsässer made in his opening speech adding that "... new methods of data acquisition and storage” would “open a new dimension of data availability”. Yet, he probably could not have imagined the vast potential – but also the risks – of what we call analytics today. The special focus of this years’ conference lies on the topic “Decision Analytics for the Digital Economy”. Tremendous progress has been and is still achieved in classical application areas of decision analytics such as manufacturing, logistics, transportation, finance, and engineering. In other areas, for example in medicine, life sciences, humanities, and social sciences new application uses are
emerging.

Freie Universität Berlin encourages these developments, ranging from fundamental research to the support of seed-stage companies. We are proud to be part of initiatives such as the Einstein Center for Mathematics, the Einstein Center Digital Future, the Research Campus MODAL, and the new Business and Innovation Center. We are aware that shaping the digital future will only succeed in form of a joint effort. In that sense, the OR 2017 conference, organized by the School of Business and Economics, the Department of Information Systems and the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science of Freie Universität Berlin, as well as its participants with their interdisciplinary background are prime examples of the notion of coming together to shape the future. Dear participants, I wish you all a successful, productive, and enjoyable conference!

Sincerely,

Univ.-Prof. Dr. Peter-André Alt
(President of Freie Universität Berlin)