The parent of SourceForge.net has decided to become Geeknet, Inc (how much did they have to pay for geek.net, I wonder). I have mixed feelings on this. On one hand, I am trying to learn from Wil Wheaton and embrace my inner geek. I have done this so well that my colleagues tell me my [...]
Do you use COIN-OR (open source software for operations research)? According to the log files, lots and lots of people do! If you are doing something interesting with COIN-OR and are planning to attend the San Diego INFORMS Meeting, I strongly encourage you to enter the COIN-OR Cup! You could join John Forrest, Jonathan Eckstein+Bill [...]
While Google is, of course, heavily active in analytics, the company has not been known for its operations research. The “ethos” of the company has been heavily computer science based. So, while I would count much of what they do as “operations research”, they probably would not use that label.
The line between operations [...]
I sit on the “Strategic Leadership Board” of COIN-OR (COmputational INfrastructure for Operations Research). There is a lot of great code at COIN-OR, and I find it very useful in my research.
Despite being on the SLB, I get very confused when it comes to open source. It seems that 90% of the discussions [...]
In the discussion of CPLEX versus Gurobi software, the discussion took an interesting turn when it came to open source (like that of COIN-OR). Sebastian, bemoaning the cost of commercial packages such as CPLEX said:
I think another long-term way to make OR feasible in situations where the cost of Cplex cannot be justified is to [...]
I just ordered a new computer to replace this one. mat.tepper.cmu.edu has done a great job over the last five years, but it is showing its age. The operating system is woefully out of date, causing ever-increasing security problems. Of course, if it gets out of date enough, the machine becomes “secure by obsolescence” as [...]
Excellent news about ECLiPSe, the constraint programming package. It is now been open-sourced under the “Cisco-style Mozilla Public License”. For a while, I had wondered what had happened to the package. It used to be based at IC-Parc/Imperial College London, but that group disappeared all of a sudden, at least from my [...]
It is heartening to see former President Clinton talk about “Operations Research” and even better to see outside groups see the promise of our field. At an address at the 16th Annual International AIDS Conference, President Clinton announced a new Consortium for Strategic HIV Operations Research. From the transcript (page 13/14):
Second point I [...]
I am attending a conference at DIMACS on COIN-OR, which is an activity to encourage and support open source development in operations research. At the moment, most of COIN-OR revolves around linear and integer programming codes, but there are efforts in nonlinear programming, metaheuristics, and other areas.
COIN-OR addresses one of my pet peeves about [...]
