Conference housing pirates--the (criminal) market for hotel rooms

Here's a scam I hadn't encountered before.

I will be speaking at a transplant conference in February, and last week my phone rang and someone asked me if I had already made my hotel reservations, and offered to make them for me. I declined, and emailed the conference organizer asking if this was how housing was being arranged. In reply I got the following (slightly redacted) email, addressed to all the speakers....

"Dear ... Faculty,

I have received word from two speakers who advised me that they were contacted by a company called Expo Housing. (They can go by other names too) xxx told me she was contacted by a xxx who left an 866 call back number.

This company ...has NOT been contracted to organize, sell or arrange housing for anyone attending or speaking at the [conference] taking place in February 2016 ....

Please DO NOT BOOK housing with anyone. As a speaker you will receive a travel and housing survey from me or another member of the  staff located in the ... National Office. Please contact me immediately if you are contacted by anyone trying to book your housing. 

Our housing website is under construction at this time but again, as a speaker your housing will be arranged by  staff.

Housing pirates or hijackers are illegal entities who "sell" hotel rooms. These rooms can exist or not exist. Often times your money is lost. Typically these people target large meetings like the American Transplant Congress, but no meeting is safe. Any rooms booked through a pirate are not guaranteed by the group nor will they be included in the [conference] block of rooms. "

  

12th International Naturalistic Decision Making Conference--June 9-12

12th International Naturalistic Decision Making Conference  (I'm scheduled to speak Wednesday morning...to human factors engineers)

Naturalistic Decision Making (NDM) research emerged in the 1980s and studies how people make decisions in "real-world settings." In particular, it focuses on peoples' level of expertise in diverse professional domains and analyzes how experience allows people to rapidly categorize situations to make effective decisions. And because situations can often include dynamic, uncertain, and rapidly-changing conditions, with the ultimate decision having significant consequences, NDM research seeks to help people understand how to make the best decisions possible.

NDM methods emphasize descriptive studies conducted in field and operational workplace settings. Research findings have been used to improve performance, revise doctrine and process, develop training that is focused on decision requirements, and design information technologies to support decision making and related cognitive functions.

Examples of topics include:

• Methods to study and support rapid decision making
• Designing visualizations and user interfaces to improve sense making
• Assessing cultural competence
• Designing more effective human-computer planning systems
• Bringing evidence-based decision making to bear in civilian and government agencies
• Decision making under stress
• Aiding police in the detection of imminent terrorist attacks

Applications to areas such as cyber space, intelligence, healthcare, aviation, and sports will be discussed at the conference.

Registration

Registration for the conference includes access to all of the presentation sessions at the conference (see Agenda Overview & Program Outline below). It also includes a continental breakfast and boxed lunch each day, along with two conference receptions on 9 & 11 June. Because of limited available seating, only the first 136 to register will receive the added bonus of a conference banquet and speakers. Spouses can attend the banquet for an additional separate fee.

There will be two optional events at this year's conference.

• 11 June: there will be a Social Recognition Prime Dinner at Seasons 52 restaurant in the Tysons Corner shopping mall attached to the conference hotel. The dinner will include 4-course dinner, wine, and beverages. An option to charge this separately is available on the registration site. Spouses are welcomed.
• 12 June: three half-day tutorial alternatives.

Agenda Overview

Distinguished invited speakers:

• Dr. Alvin Roth, winner of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 2012, applies economic theory to solutions for "real-world" problems.
• Dr. Gary A. Klein is a senior scientist at MacroCognition LLC, who pioneered the field of naturalistic decision making.
• Dr. Judith Orasanu, Principal Investigator/Team Lead for Distributed Team Decision Making, NASA, Systems Safety Research Branch, Ames Research Center, was a founder of the NDM community of interest.
• Mr. John Willison, Director, Command, Power, & Integration, U.S. Army RDECOM CERDEC. Mr. Willison is responsible for leading the technical program for all Army Battle Command Systems.
• Dr. David Woods a full professor in Integrated Systems Engineering at the Ohio State University, focuses on the foundations and practice of Cognitive Systems Engineering.
• Professor Tom Ormerod, Head of Psychology at the University of Sussex, is a cognitive psychologist who has studied naturalistic decision-making for over thirty years.
• Dr. Marvin Cohen is a principal investigator at Perceptronics Solutions on projects directed toward the understanding and training of critical thinking and leadership.
• Commander Joseph Cohn, PhD. is the Deputy Director, ASD/R&E Human Performance Training and BioSystems (HPT&B) Directorate.
• COL Matthew Hepburn, Marine Corps, USA, is the DARPA program manager for the Strategic Social Interaction Modules program (SSIM).

If you have questions or wish to submit a poster, please contact the NDM Committee.

Marketplace Innovation Workshop, Columbia U, June 10 2015

This looks like an exciting conference, I would go if I weren't already committed to be elsewhere...

"Marketplace Innovation" Workshop Conference Organized by Ramesh Johari, Costis Maglaras, and Gabriel Weintraub Wednesday, June 10, 2015 from 9:00 AM to 3:00 PM (EDT) New York, NY

Workshop on “Marketplace Innovation”

June 10, 2015

Columbia University

In conjunction with the 2015 Informs Revenue Management Conference

Organized by Ramesh Johari, Costis Maglaras, and Gabriel Weintraub

Markets are an ancient institution for matching the supply for a good or service with its demand. Physical markets were typically slow to evolve, with simple institutions governing trade, and trading partners generally facing a daunting challenge in finding the "right" partner.  The information technology revolution, however, has generated a sea of change in how markets function: now, markets are typically complex platforms, with a range of mechanisms involved in facilitating matches among participants.  Recent trends point to an unprecedented level of control over the design, implementation, and operation of markets: more than ever before, we are able to engineer the platforms governing transactions among market participants. As a consequence, market operators or platforms can control a host of variables such as pricing, liquidity, visibility, information revelation, terms of trade, and transaction fees. On its part, given these variables, market participants often face complex problems when optimizing their own decisions. In the supply side such decisions may include the assortment of products to offer and their price structure, while in the demand side they may include how much to bid for different goods and what feedback to offer about past purchasing experiences. The decisions made by the platform and the market participants interact, sometimes in intricate and subtle ways, to determine market outcomes.

In this workshop we seek work that improves our understanding of these markets, both from the perspective of the market operator and the market participants. With respect to the former we are particularly interested in work that derives useful insights on how to design these markets, taking into account their operational details and engineering and technological constraints. With respect to the market participants, we seek for work that introduces novel approaches to optimize their decisions and improves our understanding of their interactions within the market. We look for a mix of approaches including modeling, theoretical, and empirical, using a wide range of tools drawn from operations management, game theory, auctions and mechanism design, optimization stochastic modeling, revenue management, econometrics, or statistics.

The list of markets to be studied includes but it is not restricted to:

--Online marketplaces, such as eBay, Etsy, etc.

--Internet advertising, including sponsored search and display ad exchanges.

--Sharing economy markets, such as Uber/Lyft, AirBnb, etc.

--Online labor markets, such as Amazon mTurk, oDesk, Elance, etc.

--Procurement markets, such as technology-enabled government procurement

--Health care exchanges

--Financial exchanges

The talks are by invitation only and the list of confirmed speakers is:

• Gad Allon (Kellogg)
• Itai Ashlagi (MIT)
• Eric Budish (Chicago Booth)
• Gerard Cachon (Wharton)
• Anindya Ghose (NYU)
• Karan Girotra (INSEAD)
• Steve Graves (MIT)
• Nicole Immorlica (Microsoft)
• Hamid Nazerzadeh (USC)
• Christian Terwiesch (Wharton)
• Rakesh  Vohra (Penn)
• Assaf Zeevi (Columbia)

The program is here

Jerusalem Conference on Education and Economics, April 29

I'm on my way to Israel, to participate in a conference on Education and Economics.

The webpage, in Hebrew, is here: כנס ירושלים לחינוך וכלכלה, 29.4  (Jerusalem Conference on Education and Economics, April 29)

I will participate late in the day, in a conversation with the mayor of Jerusalem, followed by the President.

19:00: Nobel laureate in economics for 2012, Professor Alvin Roth , a conversation with the Mayor of Jerusalem, Nir Barkat , education and implementation of economic theories in the public sector.

19:30: Address by President Reuven (Ruby) Rivlin
************

I gather that this last session may be carried on Channel 2, although I expect that my conversation with the mayor will be conducted in English. (I also expect that it will focus on school choice.)
*****
Update: here's the coverage from the Jerusalem Post
Dovrat worries Education portfolio has become a booby prize

American Society of Transplantation conference on Resolving the Organ Shortage

Here's an early announcement of a conference scheduled for February 2016, organized by the American Society of Transplantation, which reflects some of the intense discussion going on in the transplant community about how to alleviate the shortage of transplantable organs.

(As background, recall these three recent posts:

Friday, April 3, 2015

In defense of pilot studies for organ donor incentives

There's no consensus on incentives for kidney donation, but maybe there is on removing disincentives

Two major transplantation societies cautiously consider incentives for organ donation