Month: April 2008

INFORMS Prize 2008

The INFORMS Prize is given to an organization for “effective integration of operations research into organizational decision making”.  It is given to organizations for sustained use of operations research.  The criteria are

  1. Variety of Applications of OR
  2. Competitive Advantage to the Organization
  3. Business Impact
  4. Business  Model for Success
  5. Endorsements (from top-level management)
  6. Overall Quality of the Application

INFORMS just announced at the INFORMS Practice Conference the 2008 winner to be GE Global Research, Risk and Value Management Laboratory, with Intel and MITRE as the honorable mentions.  The CTO of GE gave a very nice speech about the role OR plays at GE.

Chris Lofgren on “Hitting Potholes on the the Road to CEO”

If you are not at the INFORMS Practice Conference, you missed a plenary talk this morning that worth the price of admission alone. Chris Lofgren, President and CEO of Schneider National, gave a talk that was, at its heart, about being a successful OR professional, whether working as an analyst or working as a CEO.

I have known Chris since 1982 or so, when we started in the PhD program at Georgia Tech together. Chris could have been a successful academic (his work on scheduling flexible manufacturing systems still gets referenced) , but he chose a different path, and has been incredibly successful. He started at Semantech, then Motorola, but has spent most of his career at Schneider National, the largest truckload carrier in North America. Along the way he was the CIO, COO and since 2002 has been President and CEO (see the CIO magazine article on his path from CIO to CEO).

Chris credits his success, in part, to the skills and training he received in OR. “Not a day goes by that I don’t use the my education and background”, he said. Before the talk, he told me a story of talking to executives of a large retailer and noticing that the problem they were faced with could be solved by linear programming, and the duals actually would give the information they needed. It is nice seeing a CEO still thinking that way! Most of the time, of course, the OR background comes through in the analytical, data-driven way he makes the tremendous number of decisions a CEO must make.

His talked revolved around six themes:

  1. Insight
  2. Importance
  3. Simplicity
  4. Robustness
  5. Breakthrough
  6. Three Secrets (that aren’t secrets at all)

The talk was peppered with quotes and thoughts from his experiences. For instance, on insight, he noted that it was less important that a variable had a value than understanding why a variable had that value. Once you have that understanding, you are able to give senior executives the walk-away piece of information they need.

One point that really hit home was during his discussion on breakthrough: the need to understand things in perhaps radically different ways. As Chris said: “It is what you don’t know that you don’t know where you find the breakthrough”. During this discussion, he drew a distinction between “Making things better” versus “Making better things”. In operations research, we spend an awful lot of time on making things better: we improve schedules, we reassign work forces, we design transportation systems. And this is important! But even more important is to use the insights we have to create breakthroughs on processes and products to result in better things. The example he gave was a project we had worked on together for Motorola. Together, we figured out a better way to schedule a particular machine making printed circuit boards and we cut the time needed to make these boards by 10% or so, which saved the company millions. But the next step is one we could see: we gained insight into how to redesign the board to result in enormous savings. The redesign went against all the common wisdom, since it involved much more expensive components, but the system-wide savings would dwarf those immediate costs.

The “three secrets” that aren’t secrets are:

  1. No one cares how smart you are (though Chris bonded with the audience by saying how smart us OR people are): people care about how you can help them … speak their language.
  2. If you dare to make better things, you will push against the status quo and need courage in your convictions
  3. There is no right way to do the wrong thing. Solve the right problem or don’t solve anything.

This summary can only give the bare bones of Chris’ talk. By backing up his thoughts with concrete examples from his experience (particularly his OR experience), he gave a talk that I found both insightful and inspiring!

Some Miscellany from the INFORMS Practice Conference

Some random things from today’s INFORMS Practice Conference:

  • Sanjay Saigal, popular columnist for OR/MS Today and founder/CEO of Intechne, formerly of ILOG, just to continue a theme, chided me for not pointing to his blog. I actually read his blog, but he normally blogs on non-OR things. It is great (with a great title): check out “Another Argumentative Indian”.
  • I met Sandy Holt, who had given me a blog idea. If you see me, don’t hesitate to say “hi!”: I’d love to meet more of you who have emailed me over the past couple of years.
  • I had a good long chat with Cindy Barnhart. Cindy is the current President of INFORMS, and is an associate dean of engineering at MIT. For a person who seems pretty laid back, she certainly seems to get a lot done!
  • I also had a long chat with Irv Lustig from ILOG. Irv is extremely upbeat about CPLEX at ILOG, just as Alkis Vazacopoulos is very upbeat about Dash and Fair Isaac. As OR becomes more mainstream (in a form known as “Advanced Business Analytics”, with “Business Analytics” being “look at your data!”), it is natural that the software firms would act more like businesses, being bought and sold, and having turnover. Perhaps I overly worry about the various changes.

OK, time for dinner and an early bedtime. My buddy from graduate school, Chris Lofgren, now CEO of Schneider is speaking first thing in the morning.

ILOG Optimization Decision Manager Hands On

I sat through (OK, half of) the ILOG workshop on their Optimization Decision Manager.  The ILOG ODM can be seen as a front-end to the rest of the ILOG Optimization systems (like OPL).  I would think of it as a super-sized way of doing version control and what-if analysis.  I use ILOG software in a lot of my research (and consulting) and I generally do something like

  1. Optimize a system
  2. Change some of the constraints and data
  3. Not like the results, and
  4. What was 1. again?

Rather than do intermediate saves (hmmm… I wonder what “testjunk.mod” is?), ODM allows you to save scenarios with differing data, models, parameters, goals and so on and then compare data and results between models.  This makes it much easier to mess around with instances and keep track of what works and what doesn’t work.   Embedded within in ODM is the opportunity to make constraints “soft” (putting them in the objective, with differing weights) and to do goal programming.

I am not quite certain the goal user for this.  I like the idea of using this in my own work, where I am the user.  I shudder about giving this system to someone without some reasonable understanding of operations research:  the “end user” here had better be pretty sophisticated.

Overall, I am glad that I attended the half of the session I did.  I do think we need better hardware/software/display for demos:  squinting at what appeared to be 4 point font at a screen was not particularly illuminating, and the resulting headache chased me from the room halfway through.

Bixby, Gu, and Rothberg leave ILOG

I arrived at the INFORMS Practice Meeting, and one of the first people I met was Bob Bixby. I had heard some rumors, and noticed that the affiliation on his badge was Rice University, so I was eager to chat with him. I wrote about Bixby last year when he was the IFORS Distinguished Lecturer at the EURO Conference. I think Bixby has been the most influential person in our field over the last fifteen years or so, and that influence has been primarily through a computer code he created. Though he began his career as a top-notch combinatorial mathematician, he decided at one point to write the world’s best linear programming code. This code, called CPLEX, has had a tremendous influence on the practice of operations research, greatly expanding our field’s reach and influence. Bixby’s company was eventually bought by ILOG, a company that also does constraint programming and business rules systems (see Simon Holloway’s view of ILOG from someone versed in business rules), and ILOG has consistently improved CPLEX and provided support for the team developing it. Bixby has had a number of roles within ILOG, including Chief Science Officer.

Bixby, along with two on the CPLEX team, Ed Rothberg and Zonghao Gu, have left CPLEX in the last few months. This puts the IP/LP software world in a tremendous state of flux. On the positive side, three of the best people in our field will be able to spread their skills to other companies (Bob was cagey on where he is thinking about going, and I have not talked to Rothberg or Gu). On the negative side, there are now questions about two (with the Fair Isaac purchase of Dash Optimization) of the top codes that underly much of linear/integer programming based research and practice. Of course, CPLEX has a large (15 person perhaps) development team, and no one is irreplaceable, but that is a lot of change in a short period.

8:50 PM Correction. Ed Rothberg was not on the CPLEX team when he left ILOG. Further corrections as conditions warrant!

9:40 Addition.  Just so the following is not buried in the comments, here is the response from Irv Lustig from ILOG:

Further corrections to Mike’s post:

Bob Bixby has not been working on CPLEX for 4 or 5 years. Ed Rothberg has not been working on CPLEX for 2 years. Both of them had been working on ILOG’s FPO product. So only Gu has left the CPLEX R&D team.

As mentioned by Mike, ILOG acquired CPLEX over 10 years ago, and it is quite unusual in the software industry for a founder of an acquired company to remain more than 4 years after the acquisition. We were fortunate that Bob stayed for the 10+ years that he did.

I was also one of the original CPLEX developers, and I have not touched the code in over 10 years, moving on to other roles within ILOG. It is a testament to CPLEX and ILOG that we have replaced Bob, Ed and myself with new developers, and we have recently hired very good talent to improve the CPLEX product. The CPLEX product will survive just fine after these departures of our friends and colleagues.

The Power of Teaching

Serendipity works, by definition, in amazing ways. Because I went to New Zealand, I rented a house on Waiheke Island, which is now being considered by another professor for his sabbatical next year, who emailed me. And his email led to my visiting his home page, and clicking on a pointer or two, and then my reading an amazing story about teaching in a presentation by Daniel Fallon of the Carnegie Corporation. I will not ruin the story by excerpting from it, except to say it is about a first grade teacher (that is, a teacher of six-year-olds, though the other definition of “first grade” also holds) named Miss A, and the effect she had on her students. It reminds me, as I face another group of 80 MBA students, that education is important: I am not there primarily to evaluate them, but to teach them, so that as many as possible of them come out of the class with an understanding of, and perhaps a love of, operations research. And while operations research may not be as important as the information a first grade teacher gets across (having a four-year-old son provides a bit of perspective on this front), it is important to remember the effect a teacher can have on the life of his or her students. I won’t be as influential as Miss A, but I certainly can work harder on having an effect on the lives of those in my class.

Genetic Programming

Ricardo Poli, William Langdon, and Nicolas McPhee have just published a book “A Field Guide to Genetic Programming” and have blog to support it.  The neat thing about this book is that the pdf is freely downloadable, with printed copies available cheaply through lulu.com.  I spent a half hour thumbing through the book, and am very impressed with it.  It is highly readable, and not hype-driven.  I found it a very good introduction to the method, along with a fair assessment of its strengths, weaknesses, and prospects.

The copyright on this is a form of “Creative Commons”, perhaps the sign of a trend away from the expensive, restrictive copyrights of commercial publishers.

Me and Kareem

I teach data mining here at the Tepper School, and one example I use of something that is hard to get computers to do is to recognize faces, a task any 2 month old baby can do reasonably well (at least with regards to mothers). But it seems that MyHeritage.com has this licked: given a photo, they do a great job of seeing who your celebrity look-alikes are. And for me, it was uncanny. I can’t tell you the number of times I have walked down the street and have people say “Aren’t you Kareem Abdul-Jabbar?” That’s assuming they are not mistaking me for the Dalai Lama. I am glad I now have this picture so I can clear up any confusion: that is me in the upper left; Kareem is in the lower left. Perhaps the easiest way to distinguish is to note that I still have some hair on the top of my head. Or perhaps that Kareem is the taller.

Check out the face recognition at http://www.myheritage.com/face-recognition

I’m now hard at work to create the algorithm to prove my real look-alike is George Clooney.

Six Kidney Exchange

Following up on a previous post on kidney exchanges and operations research (which becomes a pun in this context!), Johns Hopkins Hospital has just done a six-way kidney exchange.  Interestingly, this was not done done totally with friends and relatives:

The procedure was made possible after an altruistic donor – neither a friend nor relative of any of the six patients – was found to match one of them.

I would think that knowing the effect on six  needy recipients was a great incentive for the altruistic donor.

Thanks to Mark in Auckland for the pointer!