Every time we place an online order, an enormous number of decisions happen behind the scenes – where an item should be stored, how an order should be fulfilled, which route it should take and how it ultimately reaches our doorstep. Increasingly, operations research, optimization and artificial intelligence are helping make those decisions at a scale no human could manage alone.

In this episode of Resoundingly Human: The INFORMS Podcast, Russell Allgor, Chief Supply Chain Scientist at Auger and a plenary speaker at the 2026 INFORMS Annual Meeting, shares just how many decisions are happening behind the products and services we rely on every day – and how operations research and AI are changing not only how those decisions are made, but who, or what, makes them.

When we hear the word "optimization," we tend to think about finding the best possible solution to a problem. But when those problems involve schools, communities, limited resources and competing priorities, defining what "best" actually means can become much more complicated.

In this episode of Resoundingly Human: The INFORMS Podcast, Karen Smilowitz, Associate Provost and professor at Northwestern University with a joint appointment in the operations group at the Kellogg School of Management, and a plenary speaker at the 2026 INFORMS Annual Meeting, shares how operations research can be used to tackle complex problems with very real human consequences in education, humanitarian, and nonprofit applications.

Computers keep getting faster. But sometimes, taking full advantage of new computing power requires more than simply speeding up the way we've always done things. It requires rethinking the way we solve problems altogether.

Welcome to Resoundingly Human: The INFORMS Podcast where we share how operations research, analytics, data science, and AI are helping us better understand – and improve – the world around us.

Today's guest has spent his career exploring how we can solve some of the most complex optimization problems more effectively.

A professor at the Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute at Cornell Tech, Andrea Lodi will be joining us in San Francisco as a plenary speaker at the 2026 INFORMS Annual Meeting, where he'll explore how GPUs could change not just the speed of Mixed-Integer Optimization, but potentially the algorithms themselves.