Month: October 2006

Happy Birthday to the Blog!

I started this blog on October 26, 2005. Now, after a year (and a couple of days; Ask my family: this is pretty normal for me!), it’s a good time to take stock. I’ve had 92 posts (93 counting this one) in that year, which seems like a reasonable number. The most common tags I have applied are “Applications”, “INFORMS”, and “OR in the Press” (often on the same posting), which matches up with my view that a primary use of the blog is to bring people’s attention to the usefulness of OR.

I’ve had about 8000 visitors to the blog, which seems pretty good. Not up with the big boys (sites like BoingBoing) with millions of visitors, but ahead of lots of sites. The visitors have provided some commentary activity (69 comments, about half from me). I only have eight other blogs linking to me (ranking the blog 316,042 at Technorati) so I need to get the blogrolling thing going better.

It is amazing the amount of spam comments that are generated. My system has protection against such comments (Akismet) and it has caught 2,205 (!) spam comments. Without such a system, it is clearly impossible to run a blog with open comments.
Thanks for reading!

Bloggers and OR

I try to keep up with people in OR who are blogging, but even with sites like technorati, I fear I am missing some. So if you are an OR blogger, don’t hesitate to let me know directly!

On that note, Scholarships around the US is offering a $5,000 scholarship for the best student blog. One requirement:

Your blog must contain unique and interesting information about you and/or things you are passionate about.

Well of course if you are blogging about OR, you are by definition writing about interesting things and you will naturally be passionate! I don’t know anything about this group, but they seem on the up-and-up (the site is certainly 95% useful and 5% ads, rather than the reverse).

Stockholm Prize in Criminology

Carnegie Mellon faculty member and operations researcher Al Blumstein has won this year’s Stockholm Prize in Ciminology, along with Terrie E. Moffitt. According to the prize announcement:

Blumstein’s analyses of the variations in the frequency of offending in careers of active criminals in US jurisdictions have also had a global influence on justice policies and practices, as well as on the rapid increase in the influence of developmental and life-course criminology.

The prize will be awarded in June 2007 (and is worth 1 million Swedish Kroner). Al has been President of all three of ORSA, TIMS, and INFORMS.

Saul Gass at INFORMS

Saul Gass is one of the great people in OR. In celebration of his 80th birthday, friends and colleagues gathered in Maryland in February for a Festschrift. The book of this celebration is coming out from Springer (Amazon link given, since I can’t find it on Springer: buy it at the conference since often they give a conference discount). Saul will be signing the book from 3-4:30 PM Monday November 6 at the INFORMS Meeting. I bet he would sign some of his other books (like The Annotated Timeline with Arjan Assad, his classic Linear Programming: Methods and Applications reprinted by Dover, or if you are particularly well-heeled, his Encyclopedia of Operations Research with the late Carl Harris) if you asked nicely.

Touring Pittsburgh and High School Teachers

With more than 2500 registrants so far, it looks like the INFORMS Pittsburgh Meeting will be a very big one. But touring Pittsburgh does not seem to be high on people’s list. If you or a guest are attending the conference and want to go on one of the guest tours, be sure to sign up now! If we don’t get critical mass, we won’t be able to offer the tours. Don’t let the treasures of Pittsburgh go undiscovered!

Also, if you are a High School teacher who wants to learn more about operations research and can get to Pittsburgh, check out the High School Teachers Workshop which is really an outstanding day!

ECLiPSe and Open Source licensing

ECLiPSe LogoExcellent 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 perspective. To see ECLiPSe come back in open-source is tremendous news. ECLiPSe is owned by Cisco Systems, who should be applauded for their decision to open-source. Here is a blurb about the software:

ECLiPSe is a software system for the cost-effective development and deployment of constraint programming applications, e.g. in the areas of planning, scheduling, resource allocation, timetabling, transport etc. It is also ideal for teaching most aspects of combinatorial problem solving, e.g. problem modelling, constraint programming, mathematical programming, and search techniques. It contains several constraint solver libraries, a high-level modelling and control language, interfaces to third-party solvers, an integrated development environment and interfaces for embedding into host environments.

Given that Cisco is looking for support and development people for ECLiPSe, the decision to open-source is obviously not a sign that Cisco wants to forget about the code, but is clearly a recognition that open-source code can be developed faster and better than propriety code.

I wrote before about COIN-OR, an open-source initiative originally developed by IBM but now with wide participation from the optimization world. Between the COIN-OR systems in integer and linear programming and the ECLiPSe system in constraint programming, some very top notch operations research code is now available in open-source.

EURO Management Science Strategic Innovation Prize

A lot of the entries in this blog are about significant applications of operations research in practice. EURO has a prize on Management Science Stratetic Innovation (MSSIP). Their 2007 prize will be in the area of OR/MS in Logistics. From the announcement:

The prize is intended to recognize the role of Operational Research/Management Science in Logistics. Needless to say that Logistics or Supply Chain Management is taking centre stage in Operations. In the business world, Supply Chain Management has been a crucial discipline in a global world with an increasing number of players involved in bringing even the simplest of products to the customer. It is fair to say that a separate science of Supply Chain Management has been developed in the last fifteen years (even though Logistics goes back many centuries or even millennia).

Recent events have propelled Supply Chain Management into the boardroom in some businesses but the true strategic impact of Logistics is still poorly appreciated by numerous companies. This is even more the case among policy makers. Obviously, Logistics has always been central to successful military operations and the recent dramatic tsunami in Asia has convinced everyone of the central role of Logistics in disaster response as well. In spite of this rise in attention to logistics, many organizations (public or private) have not yet taken the logical next step of reorganizing their structures accordingly.

OR/MS has been a large contributor to the newly developed science of Logistics/Supply Chain Management. But there is a lot yet to do. The MSSIP 2007 price intends to recognize the OR/MS contribution but also to encourage researchers and professionals to continue and perhaps even increase their efforts in contributing to the content as well as the recognition of Logistics/Supply Chain Management as a core discipline and function in business and society.

One unusual aspect of this award is the breadth of definition of logistics:

So we will kindly regard innovative applications of OR/MS to new or unusual Logistics situations. Think for example about risk, robustness, agility, humanitarian organizations, new products/markets/services, interfaces and integration with other disciplines like accounting and finance, and the like.

The deadline on this is March 1, 2007, so there is plenty of time to put a paper together.