Bill Pulleyblank, Vice President, Center for Business Optimization, IBM (I have written about CBO before) gave a talk at Georgia Tech on April 17. The title was “Computing, Business, and Operations Research: The Next Challenges”. Here is the abstract:
There have been two consistent drivers over the last sixty years of the evolution of computing: Computer power and price/performance improve by a factor of two every eighteen months; the problems that we wish to solve require this growth in capability and more. We seem to be reaching inflection points with both of these drivers. High performance systems are turning to massive parallelism to continue the required growth in performance. New challenges are arising in business and industry that require the solution of fundamentally different problems as well as the development of new approaches to old problems. Moreover, the rapid growth of a global economy has given an unprecedented urgency to dealing with these changes. I will review these subjects and some approaches that are being applied, with varying degrees of success. In particular, I will discuss five technical problems that must be solved to enable us to successfully meet the business challenges that we will face in the future.
Bill was a plenary speaker at INFORMS Pittsburgh 2006, and I thought his talk was one of the highlights of the conference. Georgia Tech has made a video and his slides available.