Whistler 2004

Business Meeting, Report of the Proceedings

August 11, 2004, Whistler, Canada

(The number of members of the Society attending the meeting was about 80.)

For Report

Elections related to President-Elect, Vice-President of Finance and four vacant positions in the Executive Committee

Theo Stewart chaired the Elections Committee.

There are two candidates as President-Elect (Carlos A. Bana e Costa and Jyrki Wallenius).

Birsen Karpak was the only candidate as Vice-President of Finance and, thus, she was selected for the term 2004-2008.

There are sixteen candidates (Belaid Aouni, Emilio Carrizosa, Carlos A. Bana e Costa, Jose R. M. Figueira, Xavier Gandibleux, Sy-Ming Guu, Luis Autran Gomes, Gilberto Montibeller, Hirotaka Nakayama, Wlodzimierz Ogryczak, Mark Ridgley, Serpil Sayin, Mehrdad Tamiz, Rudolf Vetschera, Alexey B. Petrovsky, Anatoly Levchenkov) for the four posts in the Executive Committee. The Elections Committee nominated 12 candidates and four more candidates were nominated by the Members of the Society in the Conference.

The voting will be electronic. The members of the Society will receive further information about the voting procedure by email. All those who were members of the Society before the conference or joined during the conference can vote.

Next Conferences

The next International Conference on MCDM, MCDM2006, will be organized in Chania, Crete. The dates of the conference have not been fixed yet. Opinions about the suitability of different dates were cursorily asked in the meeting. There were about 10 members present for whom April would be problematic and late June was problematic for about the same number of people. Late July or early August seemed to be least problematic with a few members opposing.

As far as MCDM2008 is concerned, informal suggestions have been received from New Zealand, Taiwan and Germany. The decision will be made during the next year.

Newsletter

The newsletter of the Society has been published in an electronic form since the last conference in Semmering and Gilberto Montibeller and Valerie Belton have managed it temporarily. The new newsletter editor is Martin Geiger (his term being 2004-2008). It is possible to form an editorial team to gather information about conferences, books, etc. Members are welcome to express their interest if they would like to contribute.

For discussion

  • PhD Workshop: The idea of a PhD Workshop was discussed in the previous Business Meeting two years ago but it has not been organized yet. It could be useful for the society in building networks. The workshop could be more research focused than the summer school. Ideas and opinions of the members are welcome.

Other topics: Mark Ridgley raised the idea of arranging conferences that are more like workshops with an equal number of academicians and practitioners participating.

  • PhD Workshop: The idea of a PhD Workshop was discussed in the previous Business Meeting two years ago but it has not been organized yet. It could be useful for the society in building networks. The workshop could be more research focused than the summer school. Ideas and opinions of the members are welcome.
  • Enhancing the web page: Vincent Mousseau has collected references (in bibtex format) that deal with MCDA. They are available online at http://www.lamsade.dauphine.fr/mcda/biblio/ The possibility of extending this to include references on other branches of MCDM should be studied. In addition, a collection of MCDM applications as well as a collection of sites with self-learning material and other course material on MCDM would be useful. Volunteers are welcome.
  • Other topics: Mark Ridgley raised the idea of arranging conferences that are more like workshops with an equal number of academicians and practitioners participating.