Month: September 2016

As President of IFORS I write a quarterly column for its IFORS Newsletter (which I highly recommend).  This is my column for September 2016.

As I write this, I have just returned from a EURO (the Association of European Operational Research Societies) conference in Poznan, Poland. It was a fascinating conference with interesting plenary sessions, a wide range of technical talks, and outstanding social activities to encourage interactions among participants. EURO is a grouping of IFORS member societies based mainly in Europe and is a very successful organization with robust publications, active working groups on many topics, conferences and workshops, summer schools for doctoral students, and many other activities.

EURO is just one of the regional groupings of IFORS. Two other active groups are APORS (Asia-Pacific Operational Research Societies) and ALIO (Association of Latin-Iberoamerican Operational Research Societies) grouping operational research societies in their respective regions. Administratively, IFORS has also defined NORAM (North America) as a regional grouping, but it consists just of the United States society (INFORMS) and the Canadian Society (CORS/SCRO), both of which are extremely active on their own, though they periodically combine for some joint activities.

Regional groupings provide an extremely important level between the national societies and IFORS. Perhaps most importantly, their conferences allow researchers and, particularly, students to experience a broader audience than national society meetings. If operational research is going to reach its potential, there is much work to be done at the national and regional levels. The meetings of EURO, ALIO and APORS facilitate interactions among people with similar issues and institutions. While a large global meeting can explore the breadth of operational research, regional meetings provide the structures to let operational research have an immediate impact.

In early October, ALIO will hold its regional meeting (called CLAIO) in Santiago, Chile.  Santiago is one of the most interesting cities in Latin America, and October should provide great weather. The conference has a broad mix of plenary speakers, including Monique Guignard-Spielberg, the IFORS Distinguished Lecturer, speaking on one of my first loves: lagrangian relaxation. The IFORS Administrative Committee will be getting together at the conference, so this will also be a chance to meet the members of the AC to talk about directions of IFORS.

The next meeting of APORS will be held in 2018 in Kathmandu, Nepal with the theme “OR and Development”. EURO meets every year where there is not an IFORS conference, so its next meeting is in 2018 in Valencia Spain, followed by its 2019 conference in Dublin, Ireland.

I greatly enjoy my time at the regional meetings. Each one is different, reflecting both the country where the conference is organized and the region for which the conference is designed. I have met many people I would not have met otherwise, and I have seen how operational research is being used to meet the particular needs of regions around the world. I highly recommend attending both your regional conference, and the conferences of other regions.

I, of course, also recommend attending the conference when all these regions get together: the IFORS Triennial, to be held in Quebec City, Canada July 17-21. This is the conference where the world comes together to celebrate operational research: I hope to see you there!

 

As President of IFORS, I write a quarterly column on operational research issues for the IFORS News.  Here is my June, 2016 column.

When I was a doctoral student way back in the 1980s, getting and using data was a tremendous impediment to finishing a dissertation. Data was precious and very difficult to obtain. Even when received, data often was in an unusable form, involving arcane formatting and coding. We had email, but I can’t recall using it very often. I do recall sending paper letters asking for information, with the resulting weeks before getting a response. Fortunately, I was at a top research university in the United States (Georgia Tech): the data situation elsewhere was undoubtedly worse.

The world has certainly changed. Now, companies and organizations are drowning in data with countless systems generating mega-, giga-, tera-, and even petabytes of data. In 2001, when I first put together a data mining course at Carnegie Mellon, I breathlessly talked about how the books at the U.S. Library of Congress held 20 terabytes of data, then an unimaginable number. I can now buy 20 terabytes of storage for my computer for about $500. Companies like Google, Facebook, Baidu, Twitter and many more take in hundreds of petabytes of data per day.

And, excepting privacy restrictions, this data is not slowed down by national borders. While most of us do not have the bandwidth or computing capability to handle petabytes of data, the kilo- or megabytes of data used by most operational research models are much easier to handle. For any place with a reasonable connection to the internet, data is just a few clicks away.

This has been a tremendous boon to international operational researchers. If you are doing research in integer programming, you have immediate access to MIPLIB, a library of challenging mixed-integer programming instances. You can send instances to NEOS, an online server that can solve a huge range of problems, including linear, mixed-integer, semidefinite, and much, much more. Similar data sources and system exist for a wide range of operational research areas. The internet has been a tremendous force for uniting disparate researchers from around the globe.

But companies around the world are faced with a huge problem: what to do with the data. Whether it be the petabytes of a huge, internet-based company or the kilobytes of a locally run firm, companies need to translate their data into information into knowledge into better decisions. And that that challenge is exactly what operational research is all about. We turn data into decisions. And we do it on a global scale.

Many people recognize company’s needs and I see over and over again attempts to turn data into decisions without understanding that there are a set of tools and skills that we have developed over the past 60 years that do exactly that. We, as a field, need to recognize and embrace the changes in the world. The Age of Analytics should lead to the Age of Operational Research.

My question to you is: what can IFORS do to help individuals and national societies bring on the Age of Operational Research? We bring together people at our conferences, we publish results in our journals, we aid in the education of young people through our support of summer and winter schools, we encourage and support the creation of new national OR societies. What else should we be doing?

I welcome your thoughts and comments at trick@cmu.edu. And I hope to see many of you at an upcoming conference, be it EURO in Poznan, INFORMS in the US, or any other conference where our paths cross. And don’t forget to put IFORS 2017 in Quebec City on your calendar: July 17-21, 2017. And Seoul 2020!

 

As President of IFORS (the International Federation of Operational Research Societies), I write a quarterly column for the IFORS News.  I am biased, but I think the newsletter is amazingly well done (thanks Elise!) and I highly recommend reading all of it.  Here is my March 2016 column.

I recently received an email from some conference organizers asking for IFORS to co-sponsor their conference. As part of the incentive for us to do so, they offered a reduced registration fee for “all your members”. I spent some time pondering what that might mean for IFORS. The IFORS membership consists of 52 member societies. Did they mean to offer reduced registration to the nearly 30,000 members of our constituent societies? That would certainly put a dent into their regular fee registrations! Or perhaps they had in mind that our societies might register on their own? “Hi, I am France. Can I get a room for 440 please?” Clearly the concept of “society of societies” is not common, and an aspect that makes IFORS unusual in the operational research world.

I have been thinking of this in the context of “member services”. When I was President of INFORMS (our United States-based society) 15 years ago, a major theme of my presidency was examining why people joined societies and what services a society should provide to encourage membership. The year 2002 was a year in which membership in INFORMS continued to decline, and some worried that this was a harbinger of the death of operations research. In retrospect, nothing could be further from the truth with many societies showing recent increases in membership, not least due to the rise of “analytics”. But spending time thinking about members and their needs was a good thing to do. During that retrospection, we identified services that we lacked and services that were mispriced. By concentrating on the members, INFORMS became, I believe, a society more relevant to its membership.

What does it mean for IFORS to consider member services? While some IFORS services are aimed at the 30,000 members of our membership, I do believe we need to think more about what we offer two distinct groups. The first is the membership itself: how is IFORS helping the national societies and regional groupings be stronger? What services are we offering that make it clear why a society should be a member of IFORS? How are we helping our four regional groupings of EURO, ALIO, APORS and NORAM? Of course, given the range of societies and their needs, it is clear that different members need different things. IFORS members range in size from those with thousands of members to societies whose membership can be comfortably seated around a restaurant table, and it is unlikely that any service will be relevant to all.

As a step towards understanding the needs of our members better, the IFORS Administrative Committee will be doing a series of breakfasts at major OR conference (EURO, INFORMS, and CLAIO this year). On a personal level, I am eager to meet with the various societies during my travels over the next years. I can’t promise to get to all 52 member countries, but I am going to try to visit as many as I possibly can!

The second group that we need to provide services for are those in operational research without a national society. We know that OR is everywhere, so IFORS should play an active role in encouraging the development of OR communities where none currently exist. There are 193 members of the United Nations which means IFORS has at least 141 members to go.

These are great times for operational research. There is increased interest in our field, and those whose skills encompass OR and analytics are increasingly successful. IFORS can play a strong role in a corresponding success for operational research societies, both existing and those to come.