I got an email recently from John Toczek, an OR professional with Aramark who writes the PuzzlOR column for OR/MS Today):
You ran an article on a contest I created back in 2010 called the Analytics X Competition [http://mat.tepper.cmu.edu/blog/?p=1024] where contestants were trying to predict where homicides would occur in Philadelphia zip codes. That contest ended some time ago but I am working on two new projects that I thought might interest you.
The first is a medical diagnostic site (www.whatsmydiagnosis.com) that uses the correlations between symptoms and diseases to predict diagnoses. The site ranks the likelihood of all diseases in descending order based on the symptoms you select. It’s in the proof of concept phase right now but I wanted to get the word out in order to get some feedback from the community so I can improve it.
The second is an analytics treasure hunt that is due to run in Analytics magazine on July 9th. (www.puzzlor.com then click on “The 2012 Analytics Treasure Hunt” link.) It’s basically a series of 5 puzzles that when completed form a latitude and longitude where I have hidden $100. If you’ve ever heard of GeoCaching, it is similar to this. My hope with this project was to get the word out about O.R. and hopefully attract new people to the field.
I checked out the medical diagnosis site. After putting in my sex (Male), height (5’10″ and above) and weight (over 180 lb: seriously? in a land of morbese obesity, over 180 is the maximum grouping?) and found …. a 42.5% likelihood of depression. That’s a bit of a downer. In fact, I’m feeling kinda depressed about the whole thing. Hey! It works!
I wouldn’t take the site too seriously (as the About page there says: should not be used as professional medical advice) but perhaps as more data gets entered, the predictions will get better.
As for the treasure hunt, I am looking forward to the challenges (available July 9). I hope the hunt is difficult, though. I am currently in Vilnius, Lithuania and will be for most of the week. Either I luck out and John has decided that Lithuania is the ideal place to hide his $100 or it will take a while for me to get to where the money is hidden. That’s assuming I can solve his challenges, of course.
While the popular conception of a university professor is someone who stares at arcane notation on a whiteboard until interrupted by the need to teach pesky undergraduates, there are many more activities that are part of the professorial portfolio. We drink coffee with colleagues, gossip about departmental politics, attend conferences in far-flung locales, referee papers, train doctoral students, write blog entries, tweet, volunteer for professional societies, and much more. There are a ton of things that can go into a professional life.
One key professional role is that of editor of a professional journal. Editing a journal is not a job to take on lightly. It requires a 3-5 year commitment and that commitment is contuous. Except for editing the “big journals” like Management Science or Operations Research, an editorship is not terrifically time consuming, requiring just a few hours per week. But it requires those hours each and every week: nothing will kill a journal quicker than an on-and-off editor who only responds when crises have grown so large as to not be ignored.
In return for that time, the editor can have a unique and personal effect on a journal. The editor’s judgement will determine the quality of the journal, and the editor’s energy will define the scope and creativity in the journal.
There are two journals that are looking for editors for which this scope and creativity issue is particularly important:
INFORMS Journal on Education. ITE is an online-only journal of INFORMS with a goal of advancing education in OR/MS. The journal has published pieces on educational theory, case studies, surveys, curricula, and much more. I have found the journal to be very useful as I prepare my classes, and I have published in it. This would be a great post for a creative researcher with a passion for educational issues. Nominations are due June 30, 2012
Surveys in Operations Research and Management Science. I am even closer to this journal, since I am one of the thee (along with Jan Karel Lenstra and Bert Zwart) co-editors. This journal was designed as the followup to the well-regardedHandbooks in ORMS that Jan Karel Lenstra and George Nemhauser handled for a decade or so. The idea was to publish high quality surveys (like in Handbooks) without the lead time required by the Handbooks. Like many new journals, it has been a real task to get off the ground, but we will have published three years worth of journals at the changeover. This journal needs a highly-energetic, well-connected editor who can give it near undivided attention over the next few years to put the journal on solid footing. It is an Elsevier journal which gives it some disadvantages (some choose not to work with commercial publishers) and advantages (editorial support is very, very good). I’ve greatly enjoyed working with Jan Karel and Bert and the rest of the team on this, but it needs an individual or group which is less scattered in their interests than I am at this point. Applications are due July 31, 2012.
Taking on a journal is a big responsibility, but it can be very rewarding. Short of doing Lanchester Prize level work, it is one of the best opportunities you have to have a real effect on the field.
A bit over a year ago, INFORMStook over sponsorship of OR-Exchange, a question and answer site for operations research and analytics. And when I say “sponsorship”, I mean they agreed to host the site and provide all the infrastructure for the system. It was a generous offer to a community that had been struggling to find a reliable home.
Since then, OR-Exchange has, in some ways, thrived. There are more than 600 questions, more than two thousand answers, and scores of participants. Almost every question gets some sort of answer, and often three or four useful responses. The site has avoided (much) spam through the diligence of the administrators (users who receive enough karma through their engagement with the site).
But it has not all be “rosy” (a bad pun, for reasons you will see!). The system response has been, charitably, atrocious, with countless errors, time-outs, and just plain slow days. The INFORMS people tried, but nothing seemed to help much and the open-source community that created the underlying software (OSQA) couldn’t help enough to get things working well.
So those of us who believed in OR-Exchange put up with the slowness because the system was useful. And fun. But we did hope for a day when the system worked better, hoping that would encourage more to join us.
This week, that day has come. Through the work of new INFORMS IT head-honcho Rose Futchko along with INFORMS people such as David Wirth, Mary Leszczynski, and (in earlier efforts) Herman Strom and undoubtedly others (let me know so I can add to the Hall of Heros), the problems seem to have been fixed. The system is noticeably faster and more stable. For proof, I offer the following giving the load times of the front page of OR-Exchange every hour for the past seven days (lower is better: every horizontal line marks 10 seconds). See if you can figure out when the new system went in.
Of course, it might go all pear-shaped (in a wonderful expression I learned in New Zealand) over the next days, but things are looking awfully good (“Don’t jinx it Trick, ye eejit you!”).
If you haven’t yet discovered the joys of OR-Exchange, now would be a pretty good time. You are far less likely to be greeted with a 500 error!
On Wednesday the Council of the university at which I have been employed voted to close down the Operations Research programme. The university wants to “concentrate” and OR didn’t make the grade, despite two academics taking voluntary redundancy, and a concerted effort to streamline the programme so that it is financially viable. It is the end of an era.
Let me begin by saying that I love New Zealand and its universities. I spoke at a number of them in 2007 when I was the New Zealand Operational Research Society Visiting Speaker, and I spent a wonderful couple of days at the University of Canterbury. Christchurch is a beautiful town that has had a tough time of it recently. And I have no direct knowledge of the challenges the university faces, or what went into the decision.
That said, I have to ask:
What the heck is that university thinking?????
Here we are, entering a golden age of analytical decision making. We are in a world where companies are drowning in data but are unable to make sense of it to turn data into better decisions. Where companies like IBM put business analytics front and center in their strategic plans. Where a key managerial skill is understanding data and applying analytical approaches to problems.
What kind of management program would purposefully cut their business analytics capabilities in this world?
Stunning.
As an academic administrator in a business school, I guess I am happy to see our “competitors” making themselves weaker. More for us, I guess.
As someone in operations research, it is depressing to see how some academic administrators just don’t get it. It gives the rest of us academic administrators a bad name.
If you are a student planning to study management, please ask the question: am I going to get the skills I need to survive and thrive in a data-rich environment full of complicated decisions? A management school that is running away from analytics is a school that is living in the past.
Way back in 1988, I was a fresh Ph.D. out of Georgia Tech doing a postdoc at the Institute for Mathematics and its Applications at the University of Minnesota. While I had plans to spend another postdoc year, likely in Europe (and I ended up doing so, in Germany), I did decide it would be good to lock up an academic job before I left. Email did exist at the time, but the norm was to send things out via “regular” mail. So I went down to the copy center at the University and picked out a suitably heavy-weight paper for my vita. I sent out a dozen or so responses to job ads and made a few phone calls (or asked my advisor to make a few calls) and was invited to visit a half-dozen or so places. Perhaps it was different era, or perhaps I was relaxed knowing that I had another year of postdoc funds if needed, but it certainly felt more relaxed that it appears to be these days.
One place that seemed eager to have me out was this “business school” at Carnegie Mellon: The Graduate School of Industrial Administration. Now, I came out of engineering and I certainly believed that my future lie in engineering. Here is a sign of how little those of us in engineering knew about business schools: the previous year, a fellow doctoral student went out on the market and interviewed at a number of places before finding a job at a business school. At the time, we were all a bit surprised since he had a good dissertation and we (other doctoral students) thought that it was good enough to get a top engineering job. Too bad he was stuck in a business school, we said: must be a tough job market. That school was the University of Chicago, then and now a preeminent business school that much of the field would kill to get a job at. Business schools were really not on our radar.
But I was polite, so I agreed to head out to Carnegie Mellon. It was my first job interview, so I told myself the school would be a great place to practice my talk before moving on to the real contenders.
I hadn’t planned on liking CMU and GSIA as much as I did. The people I talked to were much different than those at engineering schools. Of course, there were some top-notch OR people (more on them later) but I also talked to economists and political scientists and even a psychologist or two. They were involved in fascinating research that was a little less … transactional than much of engineering research (“Do this since the grant depends on it”). And the Deputy Dean of the time, Tim McGuire (now at Management Science Associates) was very persuasive about how exciting things can be in business schools.
But even more persuasive was Egon Balas, an intellectual leader in the operations research since the 1960s. While I did (and do) find him a bit intimidating, Egon had (and has) a tremendous love for integer programming, and amazing energy in research. He also had spend decades keeping up the tradition GSIA had of having a great OR group. Founders such as Herb Simon, Bill Cooper, Al Blumstein, and Gerry Thompson had been (or in Gerry’s case, still were) part of GSIA, and the OR group was, in 1988, pretty amazing: Gerard Cornuejols and John Hooker joined Gerry and Egon to form the group.
I received an offer from GSIA and from some top engineering schools, and, to my surprise, I decided that my future lay in the business school. And that is not a decision I have regretted. GSIA (now Tepper) continues to have a top-notch OR group. Gerry retired, then passed away, but we added R. Ravi, Javier Pena, Francois Margot, Willem van Hoeve, and Fatma Kilinc-Karzan. Gerard Cornuejols continues to do amazing work, having recently won the von Neumann Theory Prize.
With the larger faculty size comes a stable and important role within the business school. Operations research is seem as a key competitive advantage to our school. While there are many aspects of this advantage, I’ll point to two: the increased role of business analytics, and the role rankings play in business school success. If you don’t believe me on the latter, I’ll point you to the list of journals Business Week uses for their intellectual capital ranking. If you have people who can publish in Operations Research, you can be a more successful business school. I recently heard my Dean, a hard-core finance researcher, say “We need more OR faculty”: music to my ears!
And, the best part is, Egon Balas is still with us and still active. He turns 90 this week, so we had a tea for him (we had a big conference when he turned 80; we can do that again for his 100th). A bunch of us did short video clips to wish Egon happy birthday. Here is mine:
As you might guess, I am proud to be part of the operations research group here at the Tepper School. The school has been very good for operations research … and operations research has been very good for the school.
Further to INFORMS recognitions, now is the time to nominate people for INFORMS Fellow. I was on the board when plans for the Fellow’s program got underway and I, like many, was a little leery. Way back in the early 1950s, the Operations Research Society of America (ORSA) started a Fellow’s program that led almost immediately to the creation of The Institute for Management Science (TIMS) by those who were not selected as Fellows (this is an oversimplification, and I wasn’t there: how old do you think I am!). I know of many organizations ripped apart by arguments over who gets to be a Fellow and who isn’t. It is really awful when a Fellows program gets to be a schoolyard argument over who gets to sit in the treehouse.
On the other hand, practically the first question asked for nomination to the National Academy of Science (or Engineering) is “Is the candidate a Fellow of their professional society”. Without this designation, operations research people are at a disadvantage. So the Fellows program came in to being (Jim Bean, my predecessor as President of INFORMS, played a big role in designing and implementing the program).
I was fortunate to be President of INFORMS for the inaugural class in 2002, so I got to shake hands with Dantzig, Arrow, and a host of others. It was a great thrill (forever memorialized in an OR/MS Today article where it looks like all the famous people are shaking hands with a cardboard cutout of me!). And, while I know there are those who are not Fellows who should be (fewer and fewer every year), the society has seemed to survive this program.
The process for Fellows is now in the hands of the existing Fellows. They (well, “We” since I became a Fellow a few years back) have put out a call for nominations:
The Fellow Award recognizes members who have made significant contributions to the advancement of operations research and the management sciences. The contributions of a nominee will be evaluated in each of the following five categories and contributions must be outstanding in at least one category: research, practice, management, education, and service. INFORMS will name its tenth set of Fellows at the INFORMS Annual Meeting 2012 in Phoenix, AZ, in October 2012. The nomination deadline is June 30, 2012.
Remember – a maximum of four reference letters, including the letter from the nominator, may be submitted.
I’m chairing this year’s Kimball Medal Committee. Here is the call for nominations:
The George E. Kimball Medal is awarded by INFORMS for recognition of distinguished service to the Institute and to the profession of operations research and the management sciences. The committee for this year’s award is Michael Trick (Chair), Robin Keller, and Steve Robinson. If you would like to nominate someone (including yourself) please send an email with the name of your nominee along with a brief justification to Michael Trick (trick@cmu.edu) by July 31 for review in August. The website for the award is http://www.informs.org/Recognize-Excellence/INFORMS-Prizes-Awards/George-E.-Kimball-Medal and past awardees are listed at that site.
The past winners are generally an impressive group with recent winners including Brenda Dietrich, Steve Robinson, Larry Wein, Jim Bean, Mark Daskin, and yours truly (which is how I got to chair this year’s committee).
It is pretty clear that academic administration and blogging are perfect substitutes, at least in regard to time, if not satisfaction. After having an easy period earlier in the year when I racked up a dozen blog posts, administrative needs sucked up all my time, leading to the buildup of dust-bunnies at Ye Olde Blog. But it is the end of term, so perhaps I can get things cleaned out.
Let me point out two recent sports-oriented items. First is a fascinating dynamic map from Slate showing the winning of sports championships in the four major US sports (football, baseball, hockey, and basketball). The progression is fascinating, and the graphical display gives far more information than the static listing does. It is a great example of the value of visualization, even if I can’t quite figure out what the value is. The graphic to the left shows a particularly good year: 1979 when Pittsburgh really was “The City of Champions”.
Second, there were two good articles on sports scheduling. The first was on NFL scheduling in the New York Times. Lots of people sent me this, since I’m part of the group that does Major League Baseball Scheduling. The article does a great job of talking about all difficulties there are in agreeing on a schedule. Ironically, some of these difficulties come from the ease at which it is possible to get NFL schedules. When it is possible to ask “What if we had Pittsburgh play New England in week 3?” and get back appropriate schedules quickly, it is tempting to ask a near-endless set of questions. Particularly when there are many interested parties and no particular rules for aggregating preferences.
Baseball scheduling doesn’t provide the same quick response. Due partially to the size of the schedule (2430 games or 780 series rather than the NFL’s 256 games) but due mainly to the scheduling difficulty of “good trips” (an issue of minimal importance to the NFL since teams return home after almost every game), the turn-around time on MLB schedules is measured in days or weeks, not minutes or hours. Which brings me to the second article: an article in the LA Times on baseball scheduling. It even quotes my partner Doug Bureman:
Bureman, whose company also does the scheduling for several major-college conferences, summed up the job this way:
“We’re kind of in the business of seeking perfection, knowing that you’re never going to get there.”
That is for sure: we are a long way from perfection! But this year has been fascinating due to realignment issues:
All of this gets even more jumbled in 2013 when MLB realigns, with the Houston Astros moving to the American League and both leagues having 15 teams. (Currently there are 16 in the NL, 14 in the AL.) Interleague games will then be spread through the season instead of being bunched together around midseason as they are now.
Feeney and her group are currently working on that 2013 schedule, and have found it to be quite a challenge. “We’re still struggling with the format,” she said.
For a sports scheduler, this “struggle” is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, and it has been tremendously fun and interesting to work out how that format might work.
I see from the INFORMS eNews that NSF is looking for new Program Directors for both Operations Research and Manufacturing Enterprise Systems/Service Enterprise Systems. Needless to say, these are critical positions for the operations research community. And, reading Robert Sloan’s article about his stint in computing theory at NSF, it sounds like a fun job!
Here is the announcement:
Russell Barton and Michael Fu, currently completing their terms at the National Science Foundation, would like you to consider serving at NSF in one of their roles – either as Program Director for the Operations Researchprogram or for the Manufacturing Enterprise Systems/Service Enterprise Systems (SES) programs. Their replacements will take office approximately in August/September. The process will remain open until the positions are filled. Serving at NSF, write Michael and Russell, is fascinating, challenging, and extremely rewarding. The OR/INFORMS community will benefit greatly by worthy candidates being selected for these positions. Download the announcement for SES andO.R..
As I sit in a jet-lagged haze in a Beijing hotel,thoughts naturally turn to …. more travel! The opportunity to travel all around the world is a great bonus of academia. And while I think I have taken this bonus to extremes (I am not sure academics should really be at the highest tiers of frequent fliers), it is nice to visit new places, see new sights, and meet new people.
In operations research, we have a tremendous number of conferences all around the world. It is clear from things like the INFORMS Conference Calendar that a suitably enthusiastic, and financed, researcher could simply spend his or her life bopping around to conferences. For me, this is limited by a couple of things: first, I have an administrative role now, and if I am not around then …. well, I’m not sure what happens, but I feel I should be around. Second, my family already asks for my business card when I return to remind them of who I am. I do not want to make this even worse.
But I do have a few trips planned:
INFORMS Business Analytics and Operations Research (April 14-16). A great conference, worth the higher-than-average cost. I’m a judge at the Edelman’s again which has the plus side that I get to watch the Edelman presentations from a front-row seat, and I have read the papers beforehand. On the downside, I don’t get to attend many of the other presentations. I always come back with a class or two of material for my courses.
EURO 2012 (July 8-11). I like the EURO conferences: they are like INFORMS conferences, though somewhat smaller. This year’s conference is in Vilnius, Lithuania, so I get to visit a new-to-me country. Further, I am on the committee for the 2013 conference in Rome, so this conference is not really optional. On the downside, getting to Vilnius is not the easiest! I wish I had booked some flights when I first looked a month ago: those flights are now full and the real power of revenue management is coming to bear on the other flights. How much can airlines squeeze out of 2000 operations researchers?
MOPTA (July 30-August 1). Held at Lehigh University, this conference has the advantage that I can drive to it (take that, revenue management maximizers!). Held for a number of years at McMaster University in Canada, this conference has moved to Lehigh and brings together continuous, discrete, and stochastic optimizers in both theory and practice. I’ll be talking about some of the optimization we use in sports scheduling.
Matheuristics (September 16-21) at a beach outside of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. It’s a beach, it’s Rio, it combines mathematical optimization with heuristics. Need I say more?
I do have some other travel, including a quick hop to Australia to make sure people there are working hard pushing back the frontiers (I’m sure it is all optimization of kangaroo sustainability and the like, but we’ll see).
There are a lot more conferences that I would like to attend, both big and small. INFORMS Beijing would be great to attend, but I was in Beijing in November and again right now (for academic administration reasons) so a third trip in 8 months would be too much. PATAT (Practice and Theory of Automated Timetabling) is a series I like very much and is in Oslo, a city I like to visit, but it occurs this year at the start of term so I have to stay in Pittsburgh so that …. again, I’m not sure why I need to academically administrate at that time, but it appears I do. CPAIOR (Constraint Programming, Artificial Intelligence, and Operations Research) is in Nantes, France this year (May 28 – June 1) but is not close enough in timing to the Vilnius EURO conference. Similarly, it is hard not to attend the big International Symposium on Mathematical Programming Symposium in Berlin, but it too is too long after Vilnius and too close to the start of school.
And there are a few conferences in the fall that I am thinking about: Constraint Programming is in Quebec City (a trés bon place to visit!) October 8-12. Computational Social Choice is another interest of mine and will be held in Krakow, Poland September 11-13. Chances are pretty good I’ll be at the main INFORMS Conference in Phoenix October 14-17 (hmmm… I wonder how the flights are from Quebec City to Phoenix): I never miss the chance to get together with 4000 of my closest friends!
I think I’m going to need some optimization models to help choose conferences!
